The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 294, titled:
The Moon in Astrology: Meanings and Uses
With Chris Brennan and guest Israel Ajose
Episode originally released on March 9, 2021
—
Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
—
Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released July 21, 2021
Copyright © 2021 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
—
CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Today is Friday, March 5, 2021, starting at about 1:31 PM, in Denver Colorado, and this is the 294th episode of the show.
Today, I’m going to be talking with Israel Ajose, and we’re going to be talking about the astrology of the Moon and the significations and meanings and different uses of the Moon in astrology. So hey, Israel thanks for joining me today.
ISRAEL AJOSE: Thank you very much for having me, Chris. Great catching up with you. It’s been a while. But yeah, I think this is the first time we’ve had a conversation in 2021, right?
CB: Yeah, first time. So we’ve been planning this episode for almost a year now.
IA: Yeah.
CB: You previously appeared in Episode 213 of The Astrology Podcast, but that was actually when I visited London…
IA: London, yeah.
CB: …and did interviews with a bunch of different astrologers on my last trip to Europe before the pandemic hit. And I haven’t been able to visit again, but hopefully, again, one of these days.
IA: Hopefully soon once the airlift is raised or something.
CB: Yeah. So when I talked to you last, when I was there in Episode 213, we talked about that you were at the time the vice president of the Astrological Lodge of London. But since that time, you’ve actually become the president of the Astrological Lodge, right?
IA: Yeah, that is correct. A lot’s happened. Yeah, it’s been a great honor to have been elected the president. And I was actually even making the point with Kim, who was the former president, that I believe I’m the first black president of the Astrological Lodge, and she says, “Well, never mind about being the first black president. You’re the first ‘non-white’ president of the Astrological [Lodge].” So that was like a great accomplishment, I felt, but it’s a great honor.
I’ve got a great team around me, I’ve got really good support, and yeah, just looking forward to taking the Astrological Lodge bigger, wider. We’re also online since last year due to the pandemic as well. As many astrological organizations have started to operate online, so we’re now online as well. So our weekly lectures are also taking place online, so it’s really a great move forward.
CB: That’s awesome. So yeah, I mean, that’s a great lineage that you’re in at this point, becoming the president of the lodge, and you’re taking over from Kim Farnell, who had been the president for I think at least a decade.
IA: Yeah, 12 years actually.
CB: 12 years? Okay.
IA: She did…
CB: A whole Jupiter cycle.
IA: …yeah, a full Jupiter cycle. And if my mind serves me correctly, she was actually in a 12th house profection as well, which was quite interesting; which was sort of like leaving it and then I came in, so that was quite interesting.
CB: So previous presidents of the lodge have been people like, I think Nick Campion was the president of the lodge at one point…
IA: Yeah, correct.
CB: …and going all the way back to a century ago when the lodge was founded by Alan Leo, right?
IA: Yeah, was founded by Alan Leo. The first president was actually Bessie Leo. A lot of people feel that Alan Leo was actually the president, but he was never the president. His wife, Bessie Leo, was actually the president.
CB: Awesome.
IA: And then we have the likes of Charles Carter who was the longest-reigning president. I believe he was there for like 25 years or so. A remarkable astrologer. For any of you guys who know his books, he’s written quite a few books. His books on aspects are quite remarkable actually, I really recommend that.
CB: Was Geoffrey Cornelius president at one point?
IA: Yes, he was president also as well. Claire Chandler. Ronald Davidson. So we’ve had a few.
CB: Yeah. Well, those are big shoes to fill, but that’s really exciting and really awesome. And so, due to the coronavirus pandemic, you’ve started doing your meetings online. But that means that people from anywhere in the world can attend your weekly meetings, right?
IA: Yeah, that is correct. As we all know, the pandemic, since that, everything has been going on online now. It has its pros and cons just like anything in life. So we are getting more of a new audience and we’ve got some members who actually live outside of London, even in the UK, that live outside of London who wouldn’t be able to make weekly visits to the Astrological Lodge because it’s too far. And then we also have members also outside of the UK, and obviously, they wouldn’t be able to come or attend lectures weekly in the UK either. But now, it’s available for them to be able to attend online, so that’s really wonderful.
Plus, we’ve been getting some new people and new faces, so that’s great as well. But a lot of the members who are there, they have been saying that they missed that physical because there is a kind of social aspect to it as well; on Monday nights, we’d go out and perhaps have a drink. You were there in the pub with us the last time you came, so it was quite cool.
CB: Sometimes that’s the best part–meeting up at the pub afterwards and talking about the lecture, talking about the topics that were presented.
IA: Exactly.
CB: Well, hopefully, it’ll be back before too long, now that the vaccines are being rolled out and everything else.
IA: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, hopefully. Well, they reckon over here in the UK by June, May-June, so around that time. So hopefully, everything eases up, and we can come back out again and start running things as they were.
CB: Cool. All right, well, people can check out more information about the lodge at AstroLodge.co.uk. And maybe we’ll talk a little bit more about that at the end, but let’s segue into our main topic today, which is the astrology of the Moon.
IA: Yeah.
CB: And this is actually something you’re presenting a lecture on for the lodge next week, right?
IA: That is correct. Yeah, I’m speaking on the Moon. It’s actually a replacement talk, but I came in and put in something on the Moon. So I’m going to be talking about applications and separations of the Moon and how that manifests in the natal chart and how it shows particular pivotal periods throughout life.
CB: Brilliant, okay. So we talked about doing this episode last year, and one of the points that you made was just that the Moon is often overlooked, especially in the 20th century, due to the emphasis on Sun-sign astrology in modern astrology. But traditionally, the Moon was given a lot of importance in astrology and it has many different roles and uses, right?
IA: Most definitely. And it’s not a criticism or having a go, but I also think it may even shed a bit of light about what the Moon is about. It’s very interesting because generally in astrology, people will speak about the Moon sort of like it’s an inner part of our self, or it’s a more private part of our self. And that’s quite interesting because most people on the planet, pretty much everyone knows their Sun sign. Even people who don’t believe in astrology or know nothing about astrology, they all know their Sun sign; but I can guarantee you most people don’t know about their Moon sign, which I think that says something within itself. I think it’s showing us here that there is something hidden, there’s something mysterious about this particular planet, and why is it that this planet doesn’t seem to get as much attention as the Sun.
And of course, for obvious reasons, we look at the Sun, it comes out in the day. So if we look at it from a symbolic perspective, the Sun is giving us light; it’s giving us warmth. It rules the sign of Leo also as well: so it’s all about bright; it’s all about attention; it’s all about being at the center. Whereas with the Moon, it comes out at night when most people are sleeping, or they’re in their house and the windows are closed and so on and so forth. So the Moon is just as powerful as the Sun, but the Moon seems to be operating on a sub-level or a hidden level of some kind, and I feel that’s one of the reasons why it tends to be overlooked.
Again, I’m not having a criticism with modern astrology, but we open up astrology books and very often they’ll say the Moon represents your ‘emotions’, and it represents ‘mother’. And yes, it is all of that, but there is far more to the Moon. The Moon may be showing us and telling us much more about who, what, why, and when in our life than we may actually realize in the birth chart.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So we’re going to go into the significations of the Moon today. We’re going to read some excerpts from different ancient and modern authors on what the Moon means.
IA: Yes.
CB: And we’re also going to talk about different techniques that involve the Moon in astrology. So in traditional astrology and ancient astrology, they actually paid a lot of attention to the Sun, the Moon, and the rising sign.
IA: Yes.
CB: One of the changes that I’m really liking that’s happened over the past few years is it seems like the younger generation of astrologers, it’s starting to be more common for people to know their ‘big three’–their Sun, Moon, and rising–which is a nice shift.
IA: Yeah.
CB: But this might be a good starting point for giving people that are just getting into or just learning about their Sun, Moon, and rising more insight into what the Moon sign is all about.
IA: Most definitely. And we have to remember that, again, Alan Leo has a lot of input in this insofar as this idea of Sun-sign astrology. We have to remember it’s, at best, maybe 100 years old. It was due to the popularization of astrology columns being in magazines and newspapers and them referring to the Sun sign; that’s where it became popular.
I mean, prior to that it was well known that when somebody asks you, “Oh, what’s your star sign?” the first thing actually you would say is, “Oh, I’m Cancer rising, Libra Sun.” You would always state the rising sign first, which was something that I started to see when I started to study Vedic astrology, for example. I started to notice when I went to India, talking about astrology, the first question they would ask is, “What’s your lagna?” which is their terminology, the Sanskrit terminology for the rising sign, and there was much more emphasis on the rising sign. And then the next question would be, “What’s your Moon sign? What’s the Chandra lagna? What’s nakshatra is your Moon in?” because they placed a lot on it. So it was rising sign first, then it was Moon, then they’d ask for the Sun; the Sun always sort of came last.
What I’ve noticed, predominantly in the West, we’ve taken a more solar approach it seems. So when we talk about astrology, even just meeting somebody on the road or whatever or just even a general chat, the first thing, “Oh, what star sign are you?” We always go to the Sun sign; we always seem to go to the Sun sign first. Not necessarily that it’s wrong, but I’m just saying that there seems to be more attention or lenience, or we could say a bit of a bias towards the Sun and more is left out.
But I’m in total agreement with you in that I’m very happy as well to see a lot of the new people or the youngsters coming into astrology now learning about their Ascendant signs and learning about their Moon signs also as well.
CB: Yeah. One thing maybe to go along with what you’re saying is that the Moon sign and the Ascendant sign are much more personal because those change much more frequently, with the rising sign or the Ascendant changing every hour or two, and the Moon sign changes every two or three days versus the Sun sign, where the Sun spends an entire month going through each of the signs of the zodiac. And it takes a whole year to go all the way around the cycle, so it’s a little bit less unique in that sense.
And additionally, the Moon is the closest celestial body in our solar system to us, which makes it also a little bit more personal or a little bit more important in terms of things happening on Earth. And I think that’s one of the reasons why traditional astrologers tended to emphasize the Moon in charts in every branch of astrology; not just natal astrology, but also in electional astrology and horary astrology much more as well.
IA: Yeah, most definitely. Totally agree. And I think that’s one of the most key and fundamental points about the Moon, to know that it’s the closest planetary body to us, and because of that the Moon is very, very ‘Earthy’. And I think it’s quite remarkable also that the Moon is also exalted in a sign like Taurus. Taurus is perhaps one of the most ‘Earthiest’ of all zodiac signs, so I feel it’s very appropriate for Her to be exalted in such a sign. Although the Moon is connected with our emotions and how receptive we are, there’s something about the Moon that really manifests in this physical realm; the Moon is actually known for pulling down all of the celestial energies.
When we look at the planetary order, the Chaldean order, for example, we see the Moon is at the bottom; it’s the final one. So the Moon is actually the first planet. When we incarnate into this physical world, the Moon is actually the first planetary archetype that we come into contact with. As a matter of fact, we’re in contact with that lunar energy whilst we’re in the womb. And even in the natal chart, the Moon can shed story and light on the kind of condition that we were experiencing while we were in our mother’s wombs.
In the technique known as the ‘Seven Ages of Man’, it starts off with the Moon. You see, we go through these particular periods where each planet shows a particular period of life, but the first one is the Moon. So the Moon is the first thing we meet when we are born into this physical world; so the Moon is setting the tone, it’s setting the foundation. Our first earthly experience, whether for good or for ill, is all situated around our Moon’s placements in the birth chart, and this is one of the reasons why I feel that the Moon must be highly regarded and of extreme importance. I don’t necessarily want to say it’s more important than the other planets, but it must be highly regarded, definitely. It’s on par definitely with the Sun, the two luminaries.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. And mentioning the Sun is really important, but that’ll be a digression. But just the fact that from our vantage point on Earth–when you look out into the night sky, or you look at the sky–even though the Sun is so much further away from us than the Moon is, and the Moon is so much closer, they actually are pretty much almost exactly the same size from our vantage point on Earth, so that there’s a sort of parity between them in some sense in terms of just that observational distinction from our perspective on Earth, which is relevant, even though it’s not true from let’s say a universal sense. If you’re standing outside and looking at the solar system, the Sun is much bigger. But there’s something about that visual component when you’re actually looking at celestial phenomena that actually makes a difference, the fact that they’re the same size.
IA: Yeah, most definitely. And symbolically that is letting us know that there’s something about the Moon and about the Sun, that they’re on par. It’s both king and queen. It’s both father and mother. It’s both masculine and feminine. Day and night. They both have equal power, equal rights. They’ll express it in their own way of course, which there will be a difference in that, but they’re on par.
CB: That makes sense. I found a diagram that I made a while ago that shows the traditional notion of the seven spheres in Hermetic and Gnostic and other cosmologies. Before birth, the soul was said to descend through the planetary spheres from the realm of the fixed stars, and then it would go through each of the spheres and it would pick up different qualities from each of the planets along the way. And then the last sphere that you go through before birth is the sphere of the Moon, which is the closest to the Earth.
IA: Right.
CB: So that’s one of the things that you were saying in terms of the Moon being the celestial body most closely connected with the Earth and the physical body and physical incarnation.
IA: Yes, most definitely. And as we get into it, the Moon is connected to the physical body; it is the body. It’s quite interesting even from a scientific perspective. It’s quite interesting because we say in astrology that the planets ‘don’t compel us, they impel’. And there tends to be this idea or this school of thought, especially sometimes in astrology, that it’s the forces or the gravitational forces of the planets that are somewhat controlling us or making us do things in some way, shape, or form, and science would say there’s no evidence of that. However, the only planet where there is some scientific evidence of planets having some effect on us is the Moon, reason being because we know the Moon has an effect on the waters, on the tides, on the oceans. It controls the ebb and flow.
It controls aspects of nature, animals. Oysters are said to open up during Full Moons and things of that nature, so we see animals responding to the cycles of the New Moon and the Full Moon. Now if the Moon has a such a profound effect on the waters, the physical body as we know it, science will tell you is 70-75% water; so it’s going to have some kind of pull or some kind of effect which can be even measured scientifically on the physical body in some kind of way. And it’s only the Moon that can do that–where we can make that, if you want to say, correlation or rational explanation.
Other planets, we can say, “Oh, well, we don’t know that Saturn’s doing that.” Again, it’s all symbolic, but the Moon gives us something tangible is what I want to get to. It gives us something ‘earthy’ that we can really make a correlation to. It’s doing something. It’s connected with that physical body.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point because that actually ties into an episode I did last month with T. Susan Chang on astrology and tarot and whether astrology is a form of divination in the same way that tarot is. And one of the things we talked about in the conclusions that we came to was that there are similarities in terms of the use of symbolic thinking and the interpretation of symbolism in astrology that’s very similar to tarot. And there’s some authors, like Geoffrey Cornelius, that argue that astrology is entirely divinatory like tarot and other forms of divination, but then astrology is tricky because it always blurs boundaries.
IA: Yeah.
CB: Traditionally, astrology was associated with Mercury, which often tends to straddle both sides when there’s an issue or where there’s a difference between two sides. And astrology is kind of like that, in that there is that symbolic or divinatory and symbolic part of astrology, but then there’s also potentially, at least in some limited cases, causal influences from certain celestial bodies, such as, as you’re pointing out, the Moon and its effect on the tides, as well as other natural phenomenon; and then also the Sun and its effect on the seasons through different levels of light, during different parts of the years. So that’s a really good point that helps Valens out the other side of that discussion about what is the mechanism underlying astrology.
IA: Yeah, yeah, most definitely. It makes total sense. That’s why personally I feel astrology and all divinational methods do have both components. They have that, if you want to say, rational side of things, but they also have that part which is non-rational–it’s based on symbolic, intuitive or imaginative–and it’s about being able to use both sides.
We shouldn’t throw one out for the other; it’s not a case of whether it’s this or that. Both are actually operating; both hemispheres of the brain are actually at work. I know sometimes it can bring up a bit of a paradox or a bit of confusion. “If it’s this or if it’s that, why can’t it be both?” which is the Mercury aspect of it.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s crucial to understanding the nature of astrology. And that’s something I’ve been really focused on for like 10 years or so now is just the mercurial, or what I call sometimes the ‘hermetic’ nature of astrology. And as a result of that being a part of its basic nature, you will sometimes run into issues where there’s a divide even in the techniques of astrology. And there’s a question of is it this one thing or is it this other thing, and sometimes the answer isn’t either/or but that it’s both.
IA: Yeah. And I feel that it’s part of human nature. That’s the aspect of the ego that’s looking for ‘the one’, where it can feel safe and feel maybe protected in some kind of way, or feel like it’s got it; it’s got the answer. And life is not like that. Life is not black and white. There’s actually more happening in the gray areas than there is on the side of the black and white, and it’s about being able to take different aspects. It’s okay for people to have different methods or different techniques, or to be able to see it from another perspective in a different way; it all works, so let’s welcome it all.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. All right, so other basic stuff that we want to get to, I wanted to show a little image really quickly to show the glyph for the Moon, for those not familiar with that. So this is the symbol for the Moon using the classic Astro Font, which I believe was made by Kenneth Hirst.
So in terms of the traditional rulership scheme or the traditional essential dignity scheme, the Moon is said to rule the zodiacal sign of Cancer, and the sign opposite to that which is Capricorn is known as the sign of the detriment, or what I call sometimes the ‘antithesis’ of the Moon; the sign opposite to its home or opposite to its domicile. The exaltation, as you said earlier, is said to be Taurus, and the sign opposite to Taurus is said to be the sign of the Moon’s fall or depression, which is the sign of Scorpio.
IA: Yeah.
CB: So that’s just basic stuff. But for those coming in, I think this is going to be the start of a series on each of the planets where I might go through and do this for each of them. And I thought this would be a good starting point, doing the Moon with you, but I wanted to set up some of those basics as we sort of go along and go through this.
IA: No problem. Yeah, sounds great. Can’t wait.
CB: All right. So let’s see–I’m trying to think if there’s anything else before we dive into reading some significations of the Moon from some ancient and modern authors. Is there anything else you want to touch on, that we should touch on first, before jumping into that?
IA: No, no, we’re good to go.
CB: Okay. So in that case, I have a few authors that I wanted to read. Over the past 2,000 years, there’s sometimes, in astrological textbooks, just lists of significations and meanings for different planets, and I wanted to take some excerpts from different authors that lived in different eras to show you both some of the similarities as well as some of the differences in how ancient and modern astrologers talked about and conceptualized the Moon.
IA: Yeah.
CB: So this first one that I wanted to show is from the 2nd century astrologer Vettius Valens, who, in the very first chapter of his Anthology, gives significations for each of the seven traditional planets. And this is from my translation, which is in my book titled, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune.
So what Valens says is, “The Moon [which in Greek is Selenē] is born from the reflection of the solar light and, possessing a counterfeit light, signifies in a nativity man’s physical life, the body, the mother, conception, <form>, appearance, goddess, living together or lawful marriage, nurse, older sibling, housekeeping, the queen, mistress of the house, possessions, fortune, city, gathering of the masses, gains, expenditures, home, boats, travel, wanderings,” and then it has a parenthetical remark where he says, “(since it does not hold a straight line due to [Cancer] the Crab).”
Then he goes on and he says, “Of parts of the body, [the Moon] rules the left eye, the stomach, breasts, the breath, the spleen, membranes, and marrow (from which it produces dropsy). Of substances, she rules silver and glass. She is of the nocturnal sect, light green in color, and salty in taste.”
IA: Now that’s a lot.
CB: Yeah, it covers a lot of ground.
IA: That covers so much ground. We could be here from now until the next three months going into detail on one of those things. And if we look at some of the words that Valens uses there—the physical body, the life, the breath–many of those words wouldn’t even be considered in today’s explanations or expressions of what the Moon is essentially about. All of our life is really encompassed in those keywords that Valens was using there. It’s connected with all aspects of life. All aspects of physical life are the Moon: our daily life; our lifestyle; what we eat; how we get possessions, money. It’s also connected with traveling, wandering.
A few weeks ago, I remember I posted something and I spoke about the Moon having her joy in the 3rd house. And I remember somebody emailed me and said, “What? The Moon has her joy in the 3rd house?” Again, we can kind of see the connection there because the 3rd house is associated and linked with ‘travel’, and we can see how–‘boats’, ‘crossing the waters’, ‘wandering’– why she would have her joy in that particular house.
So the Moon is really fascinating. When we really start looking at many of these keywords, which you mentioned by Valens there, it’s very, very important, indeed. It’s our incarnation in the most physical level; that’s what that Moon represents.
CB: Yeah, and that’s his very first signification. And it’s interesting because we could have started this series with the Sun. We’re starting with the Moon, and I think that’s actually a good idea for the most part because of the Moon being closer and how important it is in astrology. But one thing that we are missing by starting there is that Valens, in his significations, he gave the Sun first, and he associates the Sun, because it’s the concept of light, he associates the Sun with the intellect and the soul and the spirit and the mind and intelligence of the person.
Because the Sun emits light versus the Moon, he talks about the Moon receiving light and reflecting light. And also, because it’s the closest planetary body or celestial body to us, one of his very first significations is physical life in the body and the physical incarnation, so that is probably a really good starting point. And this runs through much of the tradition, just the notion that the Moon has to do with one’s physical incarnation and physical body as opposed to one’s mental or spiritual body, let’s say.
IA: Yeah, definitely. And just to digress there a moment, there may be a little bit of bias there. If we go into pretty much most spiritual teachings, they speak about perhaps the beginning. If you go to the Bible or something and they speak about the creation, the first thing that seems to have been created was that light. In the Bible, they say, “Oh, it was non-form and darkness.” So again, it’s actually giving us a clue that maybe aspects of the Moon, that feminine archetype, was actually there in the first place.
It’s quite interesting. In all mythologies, very often, when they speak about the creation, there’s always water there first before anything else; nobody can seem to explain how the water got there, but there always seems to be water. The Moon is the planet that presides over the water–so again, we’re tapping into that feminine energy there–but the Sun, or the light, seems to be the first thing that was given birth to or was created in some kind of way. So the light seems to take precedence again, the masculine energy–and that could have been maybe a patriarchal thing as to why it is that the Sun comes first. So it may be a patriarchal manifestation of the schools of thought of the time, but I would say the Moon was also there as well; again, just as important.
CB: That makes me think of the ancient mythical birth chart for the birth of the world in Hellenistic astrology called the Thema Mundi. It was said that the world’s birth chart is supposed to have Cancer rising, with the Moon in Cancer in the Ascendant, and the rest of the planets flanking out in zodiacal order based on their relative speed and distance from the Sun in Leo, next to Mercury in Virgo, then Venus in Libra, Mars in Scorpio, Jupiter in Sag, and Saturn in Capricorn. But it has the Moon very prominently placed on the Ascendant, in the 1st house, for the birth of the physical cosmos.
IA: Yeah, I’ll take that.
CB: You’ll take that? You’ll accept that as the…
IA: I’ll accept that, definitely.
CB: Okay.
IA: The Moon comes first, especially for us on planet Earth because it is in the birth chart. It is the most personal planet; you can’t get more personal than the Moon.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Okay, so ‘physical body’ as contrasted with the ‘mind’ or the ‘intellect’ or the ‘spirit’ in ancient astrology. You talked about how the Moon is associated with the 3rd house according to the ‘planetary joys’ scheme, and I thought that was going in an interesting direction. So let me see if I can pull up a diagram that I have for the ‘planetary joys,’ just so I can show people that, because that’s actually a really interesting point.
Here it is for those watching the video version, just a diagram that shows the ancient concept of the joys of the planets, where Mercury is said to have its joy in the 1st house and it’s said to be associated with the 1st house, Saturn in the 12th house, Jupiter in the 11th, opposite to Venus having its joy in the 5th, Mars in the 6th. And then the Sun has its joy in the 9th place; the 9th house is actually called the ‘house of god’ and it’s opposite to the Moon having her joy in the 3rd house, which is said to be the ‘place of goddess’.
IA: Yes.
CB: So sometimes the ancient astrologers, like Vettius Valens, instead of referring to 3rd house, 9th house, 10th house or what have you, they’ll call the house by its name. So they would say ‘the place of goddess’ or ‘the house of goddess’ for the 3rd house.
IA: Yeah.
CB: So one of the points that you were making is then as a result of that, probably partially due to that connection, the Moon has some inherent significations of its own that have to do with travel and wandering and also messages, but also the 3rd house picks up some significations traditionally from that as well.
IA: Yeah, most definitely, and perhaps even with brothers and sisters. I’ve been just pondering for quite a long time as to the ‘house of joy’ of the Moon. Is there an association with brothers and sisters? Well, of course you’re gonna have some kind of emotional bond or some kind of emotional connection with brothers and sisters. I know one can say, “Oh, well what about the parents?” Well, yeah, they’re our parents, but we don’t communicate or we don’t ‘vibe’ with our brothers and sisters the same way we do with our parents; we may want to ask our parents for permission for something. But with our siblings, especially if the age gap is not too wide, there’s something there about that family. There’s something there about that emotional bond that we can play with, that we can connect, and it’s very lunar-orientated. It’s something different from mother and father; and again, it’s also in that house as well. And again, on top of that, then we get the traveling too.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. So Valens says ‘older siblings’ is one of the significations of the Moon.
IA: Exactly.
CB: So in addition to that, ‘the mother’ is one of the first significations that he gives in terms of other family members, as well as ‘the nurse’ or the concept of ‘being nursed’. But that connection with the mother then is important. Valens connects the Sun with ‘the father’ and the Moon with ‘the mother’, but that in and of itself might tie us back into some of the physical connotations in the sense of you are with your mother for your first, let’s say, nine months of physical life, from conception until birth, and are essentially an extension of her body in and of itself. So there’s this real physical connection with the mother and so we see some connection there.
IA: Yeah, most definitely. And the thing is while we’re in our mother’s wombs for those nine months–that’s the thing with the Moon; the Moon doesn’t separate. She sees everything as one; there’s almost like a merging into one. So when our mothers are pregnant with us, when we’re in the womb for those nine months, there is no separation; child and mother are one.
And even when the child is born, after the umbilical cord is cut, we still have to go to mother for the nurturing; hence, why the Moon represents the nurturing. We rely on our mothers to perhaps breastfeed us or whether it’s a bottle also as well; these are the kinds of things that tends to be the mother’s duty to do that. I’m not saying father can’t be involved in nurturing the child also as well, but it’s primarily the mother’s duty to do that. The father can’t breastfeed; it’s the mother that does that. So there’s this nurturing quality that really ties us in with that lunar energy, with that Moon energy.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point; just the idea of the mother physically feeding from her own body the infant and that connection there, again, in terms of a real physical quality to that.
IA: Yeah. And hence why, when we go to Valens’ keywords, he lets us know that the Moon rules the ‘breasts’. One of the main purposes of the breast is to breastfeed the child, to provide the child some kind of nurturing comfort, so we see the link and the connection there.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And that also ties in with the–I don’t know the traditional term. I’ve heard it referred to as the ‘Zodiac Man’ or the traditional associations of the different signs of the zodiac with different body parts.
IA: Body parts, yeah.
CB: I’m trying to find one really quickly, just using Google Search, where you start by assigning the first sign of the zodiac, which is Aries, to the ‘head’ and the ‘top of the body’, and then you work your way down to Taurus with the ‘throat’, and Gemini with the ‘arms’ and the ‘shoulders’. And then Cancer is next and it ends up being the ‘chest’ or the ‘breast’.
IA: Yeah, the breast, but the Moon also presides over the ‘stomach’. Why stomach? Because what goes into the stomach is the food. It’s the food that nurtures us, that keeps us alive, that sustains us. So again, you have the breast that feeds the child and the stomach that the food goes into; those are the things that the Moon or Cancer preside over.
CB: Yeah, and that food connotation is really important with the stomach, and then through that the connection with food and physical sustenance and that which it takes in order to maintain one’s physical body and physical life, which is quite separate from a more solar thing of what it takes to maintain oneself and one’s mental or spiritual life or what have you. But that connection between the Moon and food then is somewhat important, which then also ties it into two signs, Cancer and Taurus, the sign of its exaltation that is also sort of connected with that as well.
IA: Yes, most definitely. I would definitely agree with that, yeah.
CB: You mentioned Taurus being in the sign of its exaltation. But you, my friend, are a Moon in Taurus native, right?
IA: Certainly.
CB: Okay. Do you share your chart? Do you feel comfortable sharing your data?
IA: Yeah, most definitely. Let the world see.
CB: Okay, because I learned that it was important just before we started talking. You actually were born with Cancer rising, and the Moon as the ruler of the Ascendant exalted in Taurus, in a night chart.
IA: Yeah, so that’s very powerful. I’m sure we’re going to be talking about that in regards to the sect, which we will be discussing, I’m sure, further down the line, and how the Moon rules the nighttime chart or its in sect by nighttime. So that is something of an advantage for me, I suppose. But I do find people who are born in the night or who have nocturnal charts; they respond to the Moon in a different way than people who are born in the day. I see the emotional responses, the physical responses, the lunar responses tend to be far more stronger for nocturnal births than diurnal.
CB: Yeah, I agree, so let’s get into that. So that’s the ‘doctrine of sect’, which is the distinction between day and night charts that’s used in ancient astrology. And in that doctrine, there’s a bunch of things connected with it–I did an episode on the astrology of sect a few months ago–but one of them is that there’s a distinction between what’s called the ‘sect light’ or the ‘luminary’ that’s in charge during different parts of the day. During the daytime, the Sun is the luminary that’s in charge and that provides light. But at night, when the Sun goes down below the horizon–anytime the Sun is in the bottom-half of the chart then it’s nighttime—then the Moon becomes the ‘sect light’; and the Moon is the one that provides light at night and basically becomes the luminary at that point.
And this also sets up a distinction between two teams of planets where you have a ‘daytime’ or ‘diurnal’ team of planets, which is led by the Sun, and its teammates are Jupiter and Saturn, and then there’s the ‘nighttime’ team, which is led by the Moon, and its teammates are Venus and Mars. So that’s basically the ‘doctrine of sect’ without getting into it too much, but that does, going back to your point from earlier, set up a sort of parity between the Sun and the Moon where they’re much more even in ancient astrology than in some later traditions.
IA: Yeah, most definitely. And it lets you know that the traditional and even medieval astrologers acknowledged this. They acknowledged the power of the Moon and the importance of the Moon and what she represented and the weight of what she held based on even just sect. Again, it’s Sun and Moon. It’s masculine and feminine. It’s king and queen. God and goddess. We cannot throw more weight on one than the other. They both have equal rights, so to speak.
CB: Right. And so, that’s one interpretive distinction that people should pay attention to, like you mentioned, right from the start. If you’re born with a day chart, if you’re born during the day, then your Sun sign might be a little bit more important to you, but if you’re born at night then your Moon sign and the position of the Moon in your chart may actually be more important to you than your Sun sign.
IA: Yes, most definitely. The energies of the Moon are more readily accessible, so to speak, for the person who’s born in the night. Now that doesn’t mean if you’re born in the day that your Moon is void in some way, shape, or form. You still have the emotions. Obviously, you’re still going to have a mother; you still need nurturing also as well, but it may not be something of importance. It may not be at the forefront of certain things that you witness or circumstances in life than somebody who was born in the night, where the Moon is the ‘sect ruler’; they function more from an instinctual perspective, we could say. That’s probably a fair statement, that people who have nocturnal births tend to function or tend to move more from a lunar instinctual manner than people who were born during the day.
CB: Okay. Yeah, there’s a whole thing we could get into there about the Moon providing light during the night and this question that I’ve been trying to work through about to what extent then does the Moon at night become almost like the solar principle of indicating light and the intellect and the soul and things versus what does the Sun become at night; if a person has a night chart, what does it signify. I think that would be too long of a digression to go into, so I’ll save that.
IA: But it’s quite interesting. I think it’s still a very interesting point. What happens to the Sun? I mean, if we, again, go into a little bit of mythology, if we go to Egyptian mythology, for example, they had the idea that when the Sun set in the evening, he was swallowed up by the serpent and he was eaten, so there was no Sun. Of course there’s no sunlight at night, but there was no Sun; it is eaten up.
And if we look at the chart where the Sun is traveling during the nighttime, it goes through that 4th house, which is a place of endings. It’s also where the rebirth starts as well, but it’s a place of endings in some kind of way. So the Moon is more alive. She has more power. She is in charge. If we look at them in terms of rulers–kings, queens, rulerships–the Moon is ruling the nighttime; that is her time; it’s not the Sun’s. It doesn’t mean that the solar principle is not there, but it’s just not at the forefront. We can liken it maybe to president or vice president. In the daytime, the Sun is the president and the Moon can be vice president maybe, whereas in the nighttime, it’s reversed. The Moon is the president and the Sun is vice president; he’s in the background.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s a really good way to talk about it, president versus vice president, and which one has a more primary or commanding role during that part of the day versus which one’s still a player and is still important, but is taking a secondary role in some sense.
IA: Yeah.
CB: All right, so one other thing I want to mention–one of the things that one of my teachers, Robert Schmidt, mentioned and noticed when he was reading through the significations of Valens is that Valens focused on certain overarching concepts that seem to be tied into the traditional planetary rulership scheme, which puts certain planets in opposition to different planets; and Rhetorius of Egypt, in the 6th or 7th century, also puts the basic significations of the planets in opposition to each other based on those domiciles.
But some of the keywords that Schmidt noticed–and I’ve adapted this a little bit from him–is that the Sun’s basic principle and many of its significations is that it emits light or it emits things; it shines or it radiates in the sign of Leo especially. And this is opposite to Saturn having its domicile in Aquarius, and Saturn and many of its significations having this principle of rejecting things or saying no to things.
IA: Or excluding.
CB: Right. So the Moon, on the other hand, has this basic signification or core meaning underlying many of its significations of gathering and receiving things, and this is opposite to Saturn’s principle in Capricorn of excluding things. So I think that concept of gathering or receiving things is a really important core principle underlying the Moon that comes up in many of its significations that would be good for us to keep in mind.
IA: Yeah, most definitely. She represents our receptor. She represents how we receive things. If we go back to the base, one of the major words that we use for the Moon,–‘emotions’, how we receive emotions. If we go back to nurturing, well, how was the nurturing? Because in order to be nurtured, it implies that you are receiving something: if somebody’s feeding you, if somebody’s giving something to you.
So how we receive, how receptive are we, depending on what sign our Moon is in and what house and the aspects and the condition of our Moon, shows us how is it that we are able to receive. And when I talk about receive, I’m not just speaking on an emotional level, but also on a physiological level as well: how we gather things; our relationship to food; our relationship to the environment; how we connect with nature, because the Moon presides over nature.
So how do we receive that? How do we connect to that? How do we gather things? We collect things. Sometimes we speak about things having some kind of sentimental value, maybe something that’s been passed down in the family, or we speak about people who perhaps collect lots of things and we call them hoarders; people who hoard things; again, this is all lunar stuff.
As we go through life, we gather things, we take things, and that’s what the Moon represents; the Moon represents that part of us. She is the collector of all of our human and physical experiences while we are here on Earth; she is collecting all of that. And depending where she is in the chart, what position she’s in, what condition she’s in, she will shed light as to how we go about gathering or receiving or collecting these particular experiences; whether it’s physiologically, whether it’s psychologically, whether it’s emotionally, it’s all there.
CB: Yeah, I like that. That’s really good. And it’s tied in partially with the notion of the Moon receiving the light of the Sun and reflecting it–that notion of ‘reception’–but also going back to the planetary spheres; the notion that the Moon is the lowest, and the celestial body closest to us. But because it also is the fastest, and it moves around the zodiac in just 28 days or about a month, the Moon, in ancient astrology, was said to collect all the ‘effluences’ of the other planets that filter down through the cosmos; and then the Moon collects and receives them and dispenses them to people on Earth.
And that’s one of the reasons why there are a number of more complicated aspect concepts like ‘transfer of light’ and ‘collection of light’ that developed in medieval astrology–that we’ll talk about in a little bit–that become very important in terms of that notion of the Moon gathering and conveying things and taking them to other parts.
IA: Most definitely, yeah. And those things actually, once we start delving into the natal chart, they actually start setting the tones of how things are going to manifest and play out in our life. The Moon is the one to watch. She’s the trigger; she’s the trigger point.
Sometimes, even in transits we’ve seen very often, when the Moon goes over a sensitive part in the chart–or even by transit or by progression or something like that–something tends to happen; also with New Moons and Full Moons and these kind of important and very sensitive planetary configurations that we witness throughout the year.
So the Moon is the key. I always refer to her as ‘the Oracle’, kind of like in The Matrix when Morpheus is always saying to Neo, “Look, we got to go and see the Oracle. You got to go and see the Oracle.” I always liken the Moon to the Oracle. She is our ‘Cosmic Oracle’.
CB: I like that. I really like that. And the oracle also had a great like lunar energy, especially in that first film…
IA: Definitely.
CB: …where she welcomes Neo in.
IA: Yeah, yeah. And if you noticed as well, it’s quite interesting because, like you said, in The Matrix, she welcomes Neo in and you see she’s always cooking, she’s always baking cookies–this is Moon. She’s always nurturing. She had all these children around her that she’s looking after–this is Moon energy.
CB: Right. And she even had like really bad news to tell him at one point but delivers it in a very, somewhat gentle way.
IA: Yeah, she’s the mother.
CB: All right, so going back to Valens. Before we move on, you were talking about possessions and hoarding and that which accumulate–that which you accumulate–and one of Valens’ significations is ‘possessions’, ‘gathering of the masses’, ‘gains’, like material gains, but also ‘expenditures’; so it’s like that which you gather.
IA: Yeah. So that’s all our finances really. There’s something there also. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the 2nd house is not finances, or Venus or Jupiter can’t reflect finances, or the ruler of your 2nd house, but fundamentally, that first place we should check is the Moon. We should check the condition of the Moon because she’s letting them know how much gains are we entitled to, can we get, what’s the expenditures.
CB: Yeah, so possessions. And then one of the interesting significations is ‘fortune’, or Tychē, in the ancient Greco-Roman mythology and the notion of Tychē as chance, as that thing that’s kind of random, but it’s like an even distribution. And chance can be very fickle, and in that way sometimes the Moon is treated as somewhat fickle because it waxes and wanes and it changes very frequently compared to any of the other planets; so there’s sometimes this unstable quality that gets associated with the Moon because of its changeableness.
IA: Yes. And I was actually gonna also add something to that in regards to the fortune because we know we have a particular point in our chart that’s known as the ‘Part of Fortune’, which is based on whether it’s a daytime or nighttime, the sect, whether there’s a particular way where you count from the Moon to the Sun. Obviously, if it’s a nighttime chart, you count from the Sun to the Moon; if it’s a diurnal chart, you take that same distance and you project it from the Ascendant.
However, of the ‘Arabic parts’, also known as the ‘Lots’, the two major ones as we know are the ‘Part of Fortune’ and the ‘Part of Spirit’. Now the Part of Fortune is always associated with the Moon, whereas the Part of Spirit is always associated with the Sun; so that’s to do with more spiritual, mental kinds of situations, whereas the Part of Fortune has to do with where we can be most fortunate or where we can perhaps maybe cultivate something in the physical world, on the physical realm. We count, maybe, the 10th house from the Part of Fortune and that can maybe give us another particular place and what kind of occupation or work that we have. But again, the point I’m trying to make is that the Part of Fortune is associated with Moon; it’s lunar in its manifestations.
So if the Moon is one of the key ingredients or basis of how to calculate the Part of Fortune, there should be no surprise that the Moon itself has inherent within her an element of our fortune that we are destined to have or to cultivate or something. I feel, with the Moon, it shows us something innate. It’s something that we’re born with. We can cultivate that–or we can make that, or we can improve on that–we can expand on that based on our level of consciousness, but it’s something that’s already there. So by looking at the Moon placement in a natal chart, it can give us a very good idea of what kind of fortune is it that you are born into.
CB: Yeah, I love that. That’s great. And that’s actually why I put the Wheel of Fortune in connection with that concept of fortune or chance, or Tychē, on the cover of my book, entitled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, because while they conceptualized ancient astrology as the study of fate and using a birth chart to learn a person’s fate, it also had to do with that sense of fortune or chance or allotment. It is a system based on chance that could study chance-like phenomenon—like the notion that at the moment that you’re born, the alignment of planets, which is sort of there at that moment and is not controllable–that can tell you something about your future in the same way as when you shuffle a deck of tarot cards and pull a few cards, that that random sense of allotment, there can be something meaningful or purposeful; you can learn about the future from that
IA: Yeah, definitely. I really love the cover that you use there on your book. It’s really appropriate, and the title, The Study of Fate and Fortune. Because there tends to be this idea that fate is something bad or negative and fortune always has to be good and full of riches and wealth and things of that nature. But I feel there are different levels of fortune and there are certain ‘fortune’ things that we may have in our life or fortunate things that we may have in our life that may need cultivating, that may need working on; they need improvements in some way. And again, if we go to the Moon, she tells us a lot about that.
CB: Definitely. All right, so the last thing before we move on from Valens, we’re spending a lot of time on Valens, and we’ve got several other authors…
IA: He’s key. He’s key.
CB: Yeah, I mean, so foundational. It covers so many foundational concepts; that’s really useful. I just want to show a diagram of the significations of the planets– or significations of the 12 houses that Valens gives. Because I think that—again, looking at the 3rd house–kind of keys us in on a little bit more in terms of how the significations of the Moon and having her joy in the 3rd house kind of rubbed off on the meaning of the 3rd house in ancient astrology.
IA: Yeah.
CB: So here’s a diagram that lists the significations of the planets, and some of the significations that Valens gives for the 3rd house are ‘siblings’. So like you said, connecting siblings with the Moon. ‘Living abroad’, so travel. But also he says ‘relatives’ and ‘queen’, which is opposite from the 9th house where the ‘king’ is signified.
IA: Yeah.
CB: Let me see what else he says about the 3rd house, if that’s all of them or if I skipped any. Yeah, ‘siblings’, ‘living abroad’, ‘queen’, ‘authority, ‘friends’, ‘relatives’, ‘revenue’. So I guess that’s it for the 3rd house. The only other thing that Valens mentioned that was relevant, that you started talking about a little bit, was moving around and notions of movements, because the Moon is the fastest of the celestial bodies.
IA: And hence, why one of the interpretations of the 3rd house is ‘short distances’ or ‘short travel’.
CB: Yes.
IA: Short travel obviously is going to be quick. I want to jump in my car, I want to go down the road, or I’m traveling, I don’t know, 5-10 miles, 20-30 miles or something; these are short distances. It’s not that the 3rd house cannot be a long distance, because 3rd house can be long distance; it can be abroad; it can be actually also in another country as well. But the thing with the 3rd house–and this is the distinction I make between the two–the 9th house is travel and the 3rd house, opposite house, also is travel. So people then say, “Oh, well, I thought the 9th house was travel? Why is travel also in the 3rd house?” but I think they’re two different things. The 9th house, it’s more concerned with the destination, whereas the 3rd house, there’s something about the liminal space. It’s what’s happening in between, what’s happening from the moment you leave one point and you’re going to the other. It’s what’s happening in between and that’s where the connection actually happens.
And I often find people who have very prominent 3rd houses, Moon in the 3rd house, when I start explaining about that liminal space, that’s where they feel the energy of that Moon or the energy of that 3rd house really starting to make sense; that’s where the connections all start to make sense for them; whereas the 9th house is more, “Oh, well, I’m going to Chicago,” or something like that. “I’m going to fly to Chicago. My aim is on what’s gonna happen when I get to Chicago. I’m not necessarily concerned with what’s happening in between. As a matter of fact, I don’t even like the stuff in between: all the stopping at the checkpoints and at the airport, and getting my passport checked out, or staying six hours on a flight. I just want to get to my destination because that’s where the adventure is,” but the 3rd house is much more what’s actually happening. So the 3rd actually may be far more concerned with travel than the 9th in some aspects.
CB: Okay. Let’s see, going back to Valens’ significations on that second page, he says: “[The] home, boats, [and] wanderings.”
IA: Wanderings.
CB: So it’s right there in the 2nd century. It’s ‘travel’, but also I thought ‘boats’ was interesting. Because a boat is a vessel for travel, but also it’s something you get inside of in order to travel to a different place.
IA: Exactly. And a boat is something that travels across water, and the Moon rules the waters.
CB: Yeah, good point. And then that was another good point where the 3rd house often– because the Moon moves faster, tends to be in later traditions of astrology more associated with short distance travel versus the Sun which has its joy in the 9th house. The 9th house tends to be associated with long-distance travel, and the Sun takes longer to move across the signs of the zodiac and is slower.
I also think that the [3rd] might sometimes be associated more with local travel or short distance travel because it’s the house that’s right next to the 4th house, which is the house traditionally associated with your home and living situation. So the [3rd] house being right next door to that or being the house that declines or moves away from the 4th house, therefore is just like moving around in your neighborhood or moving around locally in some sense. And by extension, it also sometimes then signifies your neighbors; the 3rd house can signify your neighbors or sometimes other miscellaneous relatives get sort of thrown in the 3rd house.
IA: Yeah, cousins and next of kin and stuff sometimes can be there in the 3rd.
CB: Right.
IA: But yeah, the 3rd house can bring up the immediate surroundings, hence, the neighbors. What’s going on in that immediate environment and your immediate surroundings, your local area, as opposed to maybe something foreign, which tends to be more 9th house?
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. All right, so there’s the joys of the planets–again, Moon in the 3rd house, in the ‘place of goddess’. We’ve touched on how the Moon is the ‘mother’. In some text, I think Valens or somebody says that the Sun signifies the ‘father’ or ‘the person who acts as a father figure to the native’. And I think that’s an important distinction that might be worth mentioning because that’s also true of the Moon, where the Moon signifies the ‘mother’; but also, it can sometimes not necessarily just be the biological mother only, but the one who acts like a mother to the native in some sense.
IA: Yeah, yeah. Because when we speak about ‘mother’, we have mothers on so many different levels. We have our biological mother. We have Mother Earth; so our connection with the Earth, our connection with food, because our food comes from the Earth. We have the ‘mother state’ or the ‘nanny state’ sometimes it’s referred to as. So the government on many levels, although it may seem like it’s patriarchal, there’s a ‘mothering’ quality or archetype that is operating within that.
If you’re homeless or you don’t have a job, certain governments will try to put maybe certain structures in place that will ‘nurture’ you: give you some money to buy some food and have shelter and buy yourself some clothes. Again, the physiological well-being, it’s protected by that. So we have different levels or different areas of ‘mother’. Again, for some people, depending on the circumstances, there may be situations or issues around one’s biological mother. But again, they could be a surrogate mother; that’s a mother who’s looking after you; the nanny who’s looking after you.
And again, when we look at the placement of the Moon in the chart, the sign, the house, the aspects will allow us to understand, will shed light on the kind of conditions that we are going to be predisposed to based on the placement of our Moon, what kind of mother did we have. Aspects to the Moon will indicate perhaps what kind of circumstances there were. Were they for the good or for the ill? Were there challenging circumstances? Were they easy circumstances? Again, it’s all there in the natal chart. So the chart shows us, it tells us the story about our relationship to mother, our connection with mother, what kind of nurturing did we get from mother. Yeah, it’s all there.
CB: All right, so I wanted to transition into the next section. We’ve talked about Vettius Valens who lived in the 2nd century, but I want to jump forward several centuries to the 17th century and look at some significations of the Moon according to one of the last great traditional authors, which is William Lilly and his book Christian Astrology, which was written I believe in London, in 1647 or so.
IA: Yeah, that’s correct.
CB: So I’ve got a picture of it. I wrote down the significations that I’ll read, but I wanted to show this little picture of an original copy of Lilly where he talks about the Moon and her properties and significations. And he gives a bunch of different stuff in his introductory text, in the first, full text on astrology written in English.
I heard a rumor that there was a copy of Lilly that’s passed down from presidents of the lodge. Is that still the case?
IA: I haven’t got my copy yet.
CB: Okay, we’ll have to look into that then.
IA: My copy’s gone missing somewhere in between Nick Campion and Kim Farnell maybe, I don’t know.
CB: Yeah, we’re gonna have to go bang on Kim Farnell’s door and see.
IA: Yeah, exactly. Where’s my copy?
CB: Right. Okay, let me pull out the written-down significations that I have that’ll be a little bit easier to read. All right, here we go. Can you see that?
IA: Yes, certainly.
CB: Here, I’ll make it bigger. All right, so William Lilly. Christian Astrology. He says, the Nature of the Moon: “She is a feminine, nocturnal planet, cold, moist and phlegmatic.”
IA: Yeah.
CB: “Manners when [the Moon is] well dignified”, so when it’s well-positioned in the chart, he says, “She signifieth one of composed manners, a soft, tender creature, a lover of all honest and [indigenous or] ingenious sciences.” Maybe you should read this actually. You probably have a better–do you want to read it?
IA: Yeah. “[A] lover of all honest and [indigenous] sciences, a searcher.”
CB: Ingenious. I misread it.
IA: I’m sorry, ingenious. Why am I saying ‘indigenous’?
CB: Yeah, it’s tricky.
IA: “[A] love of all honest and ingenious sciences, a searcher of, and delighter of novelties, naturally propense to…”
CB: Sorry. Sharing it through Zoom, it’s probably too small on your screen. Sorry about that.
IA: I’m spinning a bit.
CB: Yeah, that’s all right. I caught you off guard there. So it says: “[N]aturally propense to flit and shift his habitation.”
IA: Yeah.
CB: It’s like 17th century English, so we’re both struggling a little bit here. “[U]nsteadfast, wholly caring for the present times, timorous.” Do you know what that means?
IA: No.
CB: I have no idea either.
IA: I need to get my dictionary.
CB: Your 17th century English dictionary. “[P]rodigal, and easily frightened, however loving peace, and to live free from the cares of this life, if a mechanic, the man learns many occupations, and frequently will be tampering with many ways to trade in.” So that’s when it’s well-placed in the chart. Then it goes on in another section and says, “Manners when badly placed: A mere vagabond, idle person, hating labor, a drunkard, a sot, one of no spirit or forecast, delighting to live beggarly and carelessly, one content in no condition of life, either good or ill.”
So that’s an interesting thing–a little bit of a shift here where he’s focusing a little bit more on personality characteristics.
IA: Personality, yeah.
CB: But also a really important and interesting distinction that he’s making here is between if the planet is well-placed in the chart, he says ‘well dignified’ versus when it is badly-placed. And some of the conditions that might change that would be things like essential dignity, like if the Moon was in its own sign or exaltation, versus if it was in a more difficult sign, but also what aspects does it have from other planets and are they let’s say supportive aspects from the benefics, Venus and Jupiter, or if they’re challenging aspects, hard aspects like squares or oppositions from the malefic planets, Mars and Saturn.
IA: Yeah, yeah, and that would make sense. And what I would also say to that is I don’t want people who are listening, who are perhaps checking up on their Moon, thinking, “Oh, my god, my Moon’s in detriment or fall,” or “I’ve got my Moon squared Saturn.” What I will say with those particular characteristics is that obviously for the more positive, when the Moon is well-dignified, what I would say is that those kinds of characters or that personality could be more readily accessible; it could be easy for one to captivate that or expand on that. Whereas the more negative, if the Moon’s in a negative place, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a vagabond or you’re going to be lazy or idle, some of the words that he used. But it’s indicating that it could happen more easily, or it could be a particular character that could be readily accessible, that you could easily slip into that kind of character, if you’re not taking precaution or you’re not being aware.
CB: Right. I know in modern astrology, for example, sometimes Saturn square the Moon, which is something I have, is something where people can be predisposed towards depressive states or something like that, which might be, like you were saying, a predisposition or a tendency, but not necessarily something that has to be that way and can be mitigated or altered, or that you just have to take each delineation with a grain of salt.
IA: Yeah, yeah, there’s a potential for it. Of course I would say, like the example that you gave, maybe somebody with Moon square Saturn, it could be said that it’s easier maybe for them to slip into a state of depression than somebody who does not have that, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to do that. But yeah, that kind of energy is more readily accessible to you, or you’re more prone to it, we could say, but it doesn’t mean that life has to be that way continuously for you.
CB: Right. Definitely. And that’s a really good point because I had somebody mention something recently. They sent me a message through Instagram, and they were like, “I have this placement. Does this mean this worst-case scenario?” And I had to write them back, no, it doesn’t necessarily mean that. You shouldn’t necessarily jump to the worst-case assumptions about placements, even though sometimes new students can have that tendency, new students of astrology, and can have those worries. But most of the time, it’s not going to be the worst-case scenario. You’re just talking about a possible predisposition towards certain types of scenarios, but there’s a lot of multivalence in how different placements can manifest in a person’s life.
IA: Most definitely, most definitely. Although we do have to look at, obviously, things individually, but we also have to look at the chart as a whole; and we have to also take in other particular factors as well, whether it’s aspects, or what sign is it from, what house is it from, what sect is it from. As you’re always saying in many of your talks, there are mitigating factors. And things may seem a bit heavy from one perspective, but when you start taking other things into account, often it’s less than worse–maybe not as heavy or as bad as you may think it is–so other things need to be taken into consideration as well.
CB: Definitely. All right, so what are some things we should take note of in terms of Lilly’s delineations, aside from those two things we mentioned? I mean, he did mention the notion of ‘changeability’; it does seem to be something he’s emphasizing.
IA: Yeah, I think that’s something that’s consistent with the Moon. As you mentioned earlier, she changes signs every two-and-a-half days. She’s very swift, she’s the fast-moving planet, so that’s a word that’s often associated with the Moon. She’s very changeable, which again is connected with that ebb and flow, New Moon/Full Moon, waxing/waning.
CB: So here’s a diagram of the lunar phases that it goes through in the course of a month. If you pay attention, like ancient sky watchers and astrologers did, where not living in large cities, with electronic lights and stuff, you could see much more clearly the night sky and the stars, but also the Moon and how quickly and how rapidly it changes compared to the other planets like, for example, Saturn, which is very slow-moving, or Jupiter. We recently saw an alignment or a conjunction of those two planets in the sky, but it took quite a while for them to move past each other, whereas the Moon by relative comparison just zooms through the zodiac every 28 days.
IA: And as I said the Sun controls the seasons, whereas the Moon controls the days and the months. The word ‘month’ actually comes from the root word ‘Moon’; so there’s something again about that in ancient times. I mean, thousands and thousands of years ago that was what humans were looking at, they saw the sky.
Like you said, they can see it in the bright lights. They saw the cosmic activity. They saw, like, “Ah, New Moon. Ah, a Full Moon, 28 days later.” They’ve found markings on bones dated thousands and thousands of years ago with lunar calendars marked on them, inscribed on them. Women would have noticed, again, the correlation between, “Ah, the Moon seems to be in the same place my menstrual cycle has come.”
Again, meno or ‘menstrual’, that’s all rooted from the Moon, so these are things that we see again on a physiological level. We’re seeing the female, the feminine, if you want to say, acting out this lunar archetype, again, in parts of their body, whether they’re giving birth to a child, whether they’re having a particular sensitive menstrual cycle or period of the month, which all correlates with the cycle of the Moon. Every 28-29 days, we see that cycle happening.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really great point. Let me show Solar Fire really quickly. One of the things I love about this program the most is the ability to animate it, which is really useful for electional astrology; but also sometimes just in terms of getting oriented with the basic astronomy of how the charts and how the planets move. So I’ll animate the chart starting from today. So right now the Moon is at 13 degrees of Sagittarius, and I’ll animate it so that it moves forward a few days a second. And you’ll see the Moon move through the signs of the zodiac and how quickly it does compared to the rest of the planets, just moving all the way around the 12 signs over the course of a single month. So again, just emphasizing that notion of…
IA: She’s the ‘minute of the hour’, or we could say the ‘second of the minute’, or ‘minute of the hour’ there.
CB: I liked ‘minute’. Like if it was a clock…
IA: Yeah, clock. A minute, yeah.
CB: …it would be like a minute and then the Sun would be like the hour and then the Ascendant might be like the second.
IA: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
CB: Okay.
IA: So she’s real crucial.
CB: Right. Is there anything else we need to mention at this point from Lilly’s significations? Let me share them again. We spent obviously a lot of time on Valens, but it’s like it carried forward a lot of things from that. So he talks about ‘softness’ and ‘tenderness’, and that’s probably a good one for the Moon in terms of its natural tendency if it’s, let’s say, well-situated.
IA: Yeah, the Moon is soft. She is gentle. She’s not rough. The Sun–it scorches, it burns. Fair enough, the Sun gives us heat and warmth and light, but the Moon is far more receptive, far more gentle, far more soft.
CB: Right, you don’t get a sunburn from standing outside in the moonlight, even though it’s lighting things up. But if you stand outside you can get heat stroke from the Sun.
IA: Yeah. And hence, why when we look at a planet that’s within a certain range of the Sun, it’s combust; it’s too hot. If a planet’s next to the Moon, it’s not the case. As a matter of fact, if a planet is next to the Moon, the Moon may be able to offer some kind of tenderness, some softness, some soothing perhaps even to that planet on some level.
So the Moon’s different. She’s definitely gentle, she’s definitely very soft. She’s the Great Mother, just how we predominantly expect mothers to be. To be gentle, to be soft, to be loving, to be kind, to be nurturing. Those are the qualities of the Moon.
CB: That makes sense. All right, so other things that are worth mentioning at this stage in terms of some of the traditional stuff is not just the sign of the Moon but the applications of the Moon. Because it’s so fast, ancient astrologers tended to focus– there was a doctrine in Paulus Alexandrinus, for example, from the 4th century, where he talks about the applications and separations of the Moon. He says to look at the Moon and what planets it applies to in the next 30 degrees and then different ranges of that will represent different parts of the life and when certain things will manifest during different parts of the life.
IA: Yeah, most certainly because the Moon, she’s like an anchor that anchors us here in the physical world. So when the Moon is applying herself to a particular planet, what she’s actually doing – and this is later on in medieval astrology, the idea of when the Moon is separating from a planet, it represents things from the past, or when she’s applying to a planet it’s representing things to come; also in horary as well. This is based on the idea that when the Moon is applying to a planet, whatever that planet represents, whatever the energy of that planet represents, she’s going to draw it down and bring that energy into physical manifestation.
So if the Moon is applying herself to Mars, she’s going to draw down a ‘Martian’ energy, and there’s going to be a ‘Martian’ experience that that individual is going to encounter. If it’s Jupiter, the same thing as well and that’s what she represents. Any planet that the Moon is making contact with, whether it’s applying or separating, it’s energies that she is drawing down.
So what I tend to find when the Moon is separating from a planet, we tend to find those particular experiences, obviously, that’s gone, in the past, something that happened maybe earlier in the life of the individual; whereas if she’s applying and she’s making her way towards a particular planet, it tends to be experiences that the person will encounter maybe middle-aged or later on in life depending on how far away it is, but it tends to be a bit more continuous. When she’s leaving a planet that energy tends to be waning a bit, whereas the planet that she’s going towards tends to be something a bit more full-on that the individual will tend to experience. But any planet that she’s making aspects to, she’s grounding it, she’s anchoring it, she’s bringing it into physical manifestation for us.
And hence, the idea of the ‘void’ Moon, void-of-course, this emptiness where it’s not making aspects. I know it’s very rare, especially in Hellenistic astrology. It’s something that doesn’t occur too often because they kind of gave a 30-degree orb, you could say. And they also include ‘out-of-sign’ boundaries as well, so it could go across. So that’s where that came from because it was seen that if the Moon was not making no aspects to no planets, then what is it that she’s going to be anchoring? What is it that she’s going to be bringing down? What is it that it’s going to be manifesting? Well, it’s not going to be manifesting nothing because she’s not making no contact with nothing.
And the importance was placed on also what was the planet that she was separating from, what was the last planet that she made contact to because that was where she was coming from. And again, that’s where we get this ‘translation of light’, where she’s bringing energy from one planet, based on the planet that she’s separating from and she’s taking that light and transferring it to the planet that she’s going towards as well. But if she’s void, it’s almost like there’s no planet anchoring her. So that can also be a bit of a, if you want to say, a bit of an issue, or maybe a bit problematic if we do find that kind of configuration in someone’s natal chart, where there can be certain issues with, again, manifesting something and having some kind of connection.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And that also gets extended into horary astrology and electional astrology, especially with the Moon, but also with other planets. Separating aspects are said to indicate the past and applying aspects are said to indicate what’s coming up in the future.
IA: Yeah, most definitely. It’s really, really important. And with electional astrology, you’re trying to find an auspicious time. Whether it’s a wedding, setting up a business, whatever the case may be, the Moon is going to be the key planet that you’re looking at to see where is she coming from and where is she going. You want to elect a time where the Moon is making some kind of contact with the planet that is associated with what it is you’re trying to manifest. What is it that you are trying to anchor? What is it you’re trying to bring down into this physical manifestation? And that also lends itself into astro-magic and things of that nature. Again, they would elect particular times when the Moon was in a certain aspect with a particular planet because then she was able to ground that planet.
CB: Yeah, so that’s a good point about the void-of-course Moon. So I did a whole episode, a discussion about that with Yasmin Boland last month…
IA: Yeah, I saw that.
CB: …and we talked about the three different definitions and the Hellenistic definition. And I’m going to do another episode later this month actually with Sue Ward where we’re going to talk about the ‘considerations before judgment’, where the void-of-course Moon was one of those.
So I showed a diagram already, but I also wanted to mention this delineation from Paulus about what the ranges are because I’ve been looking into the void-of-course Moon origins more and thinking about that and realizing that that was part of the origins, just that notion that whatever the Moon is applying to in the next 30 degrees is going to indicate different things that will manifest in different parts of the life. And if the Moon is not applying to anything in the next 30 degrees, then it almost indicates a lack of anything coming to fruition during that time. And I think that’s why the void-of-course Moon in the Hellenistic definition was often interpreted so negatively, just due to the notion of lack of tangible things coming to fruition or coming to completion in terms of either the natal chart or an electional charter or what have you.
IA: Yeah, definitely. I once had–well, he still is a client–a client of mine who I see quite regularly, and he has an unaspected Moon. When he was one born, it’s not making no aspect to no planets. It’s almost like the planets are on one side of the chart, the Moon’s in another sector, and it’s not making no aspects whatsoever by opposition, square; it’s not making none. And when I first did his chart reading and consultation, I wanted to try and see what kind of relationship he had with mother. And it was very interesting because the word he used was really–he said to me, “There’s nothing there. I have no feelings for her.”
CB: Okay, so there was a void or an emptiness.
IA: Yeah, there was like this emptiness; it’s like he couldn’t relate. Okay, he knew that was his mother of course, but then there was no…
CB: No connection.
IA: No connection whatsoever. And it was just really funny, the words that he was using were words that, again, were truly of a void-of-course Moon. That’s what I would expect to hear.
CB: Right. That makes sense because the original Greek term for an application was synaphe, which also means ‘connection’ or ‘joining’. And we were talking about this on the last forecast episode of The Astrology Podcast, in the episode right before this one, towards the end of that episode; and I released a little clip of that on YouTube yesterday.
But one of the keywords that were coming up for a void-of-course Moon was a ‘lonely’ Moon because it has no relationships…
IA: To nobody, yeah.
CB: …with any other planets. And that’s what an aspect represents: a relationship between two planets.
IA: Yeah, exactly. So it becomes a loner. It becomes a wanderer. It can become idle. It can’t manifest things. It can’t get things done. It can’t seem to complete things. There may even be a feeling–this is in the natal chart. There could be a feeling of, “Why am I here? Anything I put my hands on just doesn’t seem to work out for me. It’s almost like there’s just a repetition of failure after failure. I can’t complete things. I can’t build.” These are many of the words that have been associated with a void-of-course Moon in the natal chart.
CB: Right. And in electional astrology, I think, from the traditional statement from Lilly, it goes ‘hardly forward’ or something like that. Do you remember what this statement is?
IA: Yeah, it’s almost like it can’t be completed in some kind of way; it can’t be fulfilled, if it’s void-of-course. Hence, why they say in horary astrology, if the Moon is void, nothing will come of the matter. I don’t know how true it is, but I heard or read somewhere that Nancy Reagan, who was Ronald Reagan’s wife, apparently had an astrologer. And when Ronald Reagan was due to have meetings, let’s say he was having a meeting with Russia or with Iran about nuclear bombs or something like that, the astrologer would elect a time when the Moon was void for them to have the meeting so nothing would come of the meeting, so it would favor the US. But I don’t know how true it was. It could have just been rumors or lies. I can’t confirm how true it is, but it would make sense. I could see the sense in it that, okay, yeah, arrange a meeting when the Moon is void because nothing’s gonna come of the matter.
And in horary astrology, when they bring up a chart, one of the first things that they would look at, they’re going to look at the Moon. And once they see the Moon’s void, then they say, “Well, in regards to your question, it’s not going to happen.” Nothing’s going to come of the matter. Nothing can come of the matter because the Moon is not in a position where she can anchor. She has the last say as to how something gets anchored in the chart: whether it’s natally; whether it’s electional; whether it’s a horary. So if she’s not making no aspects, nothing can be grounded, nothing can come of it, so it can’t move forward; it can’t manifest; it can’t work.
CB: Yeah. So here’s the definition of void-of-course from Lilly. He says, “A Planet is voyd of course, when he is separated from a planet, nor doth forthwith, during his being in that Signe, apply to any other: This is most usually in the Moon; [in the case of the Moon] in judgments doe you carefully observe whether she be voyd of course yea or no; you shall seldom see a business goe handsomely forward when she is so.” So that’s the traditional rule for void-of-course.
So we were talking about in the Hellenistic tradition how that was a 30-degree range and it changed; I did want to share a change later, which we’ll get into in a second. I want to share two things really quickly: one is just for those that are still new and still trying to conceptualize application versus separation, let’s imagine you’ve got a chart where the Moon is at 15 degrees of Aquarius, and Jupiter is at 14 degrees of Aquarius, and Venus is at 16 degrees of Aquarius.
So in this chart, the Moon is separating from a conjunction with Jupiter and then she’s applying to a conjunction with Venus. So in this context, let’s say this is an electional chart, the Moon would be separating from Jupiter. So Jupiter would be what was in the past leading up to the electional chart or the horary question; whereas the Moon is applying to Venus, so Venus would be indicating what is coming up in the future. So this would be traditionally a case of ‘positive enclosure’ or ‘besiegement’ between two benefics.
IA: Yeah. And the way that–also from a natal perspective–I tend to approach that is the planet that the Moon is separating from in the natal chart is kind of like an energy. So remember what we were saying earlier on about the Moon being the receiver, the gatherer; she’s also the anchor. So when the Moon is moving from a planet, what it’s indicating is that the nature of that planet is something that the Moon has already gathered.
So imagine somebody traveling and they’ve already packed their bags. So if the Moon was moving from Jupiter–like in that chart that you just showed now–she’s already packed ‘Jupiterian’ and jovial things in the bag. However, she’s now going towards Venus. So her mission now is to take those goods that are of a ‘Jupiterian’ or and ‘Jovian’ nature and hand them over and give them now to Venus. And the relationship between her and the planet that she’s meeting is going to let us know what kind of meeting is it. Obviously, Venus is a benefic, so that’s going to let us know it’s going to be a benefic meeting, a meeting of love and strong union there; so that’s how we interpret it.
So in the natal chart, what that tends to manifest as, what I tend to find is that the planet that the Moon is going towards in the natal chart strongly shows a very strong theme that is going to play out in the native’s life; and that theme will often take place in their occupation, maybe in their work, but it will be something that’s really recognizable in that person’s life. Whether it’s challenging, whether it’s difficult, whether it’s great, again, the planet and the condition of the planet that she’s coming from and going to will dictate that.
CB: Yeah, in a natal chart, I tend to think of the separating aspect that the Moon has as sort of what you’re born with and what you come into this life with in terms of what you have going for you or what you have going against you, in terms of like your parents, or your surroundings, or your relationship with them and their situation; whereas the applying aspects are like the things that will develop at some point later on in your life that you will meet during the course of your life.
IA: Yeah, most definitely. So the Moon’s actually telling us. She’s already got the life story there; it’s already mapped out. We could say that the skeleton structure of it is mapped out.
CB: Right, so that actually ties us into the Paulus quote. I’ve got my print translation here of Dorian Greenbaum’s translation of Paulus Alexandrinus, but Chapter 17, and I just took a little picture of these two pages, its on Concerning the Separation and Application which the Moon Makes to the Wandering Stars. And I’ll just read parts of it really quickly. It says, “Since the reckoning concerning application and separation happens to be varied, it is necessary to lay out the teaching concerning it. It holds thus: if the Moon happens to be in a greater degree than a star in the same [sign of the zodiac], she has made a separation from it, just as if a star which has dealings with the Moon, actually being in the same [sign of the zodiac] but having more degrees than the Moon does, itself admits of an application by the Moon. In the same way, if the stars have been found in the [zodiacal sign] following or leading the Moon, actually being within 30 degrees, they hold to the reckoning of separation and application.”
So I thought that was really interesting because it means, at least to Paulus, it’s not just planets that the Moon is applying to within the next 30 degrees, but it’s also planets that the Moon is separating from within the last 30 degrees, which is kind of interesting.
IA: Yeah. Like I said, she’s the gatherer. So that last planet that she’s made contact with, she’s gathered something. She’s gathered an experience and she’s bringing it along with her; it’s in her bag.
CB: Right. So then skipping a paragraph, when he just gives a couple examples of application and separation, he says: “The reckoning concerning separation and application is always most efficacious when acting in an arc from the first to 3rd degrees, as far as the form of the outcomes is concerned.” So he’s saying the most important range is if the Moon is applying to any planets in the next 3 degrees.
IA: Right.
CB: Then he says: “The second <tier> of the aforesaid tabulation of degrees is that having the number from the first degree up to an arc of seven degrees.” So the next degree range is up to 7 degrees orb from the Moon applying. Next, he says: “The third, in efficacy, from the first degree to the 15th.” Then he goes on and he says: “<[T]he> fourth tier conducts business, according to the reckoning concerning separation and application, from the first degree up to the 30th. Either separation or application being taken <from these> later variances possesses efficacy after long amounts of time and not from youth, I mean making the accomplishment of what will be, whether good or base from middle age or even in old age.”
So it’s really interesting because then it breaks up that 30-degree range into different tiers and tells you what part of the life it manifests in.
IA: The way it’s going to manifest.
CB: Which by extension, it sort of then makes sense why the notion of having a void-of-course Moon is seen as problematic if it’s not applying to anything within 30 degrees, because then it’s like there’s nothing coming up within the span of the life that is notable or eventful in some way.
IA: Yeah, definitely. And I know with horary astrology there tends to be the idea that the void-of-course, obviously, it’s the Moon not making aspect to a planet before it leaves that sign. So I quite like the idea that the Hellenistic or the traditional astrologers were using there with the whole 30 degrees because that can go past the sign also as wel. It can go actually into the next sign too.
CB: Yeah. And there’s two different definitions that we talked about on the last episode, and one of them is that more modern definition which happens much more frequently, which is that the Moon is void-of-course as soon as it completes the last aspect that will profect within a given sign, yeah and that it’s void-of-course in the rest of the sign until it changes signs, where it will start applying to another planet.
So for example, here’s an example chart where let’s say the Moon is at 26 degrees of Scorpio and the last aspect that it made was a trine to Jupiter at 25 degrees of Cancer. So the Moon, according to the modern definition then, would be said to be void-of-course as soon as it completes that last aspect with Jupiter for the next, what, 4 or 5 degrees through the end of Scorpio until it changes signs. That happens kind of frequently in terms of the Moon. Using that definition, it goes void-of-course every two or three days.
IA: Exactly, exactly, so that’s a common phenomenon, whereas the one laid out by the traditional Hellenistic astrologers would have been a lot less frequent.
CB: Yeah. As far as I can tell last year, it only happened once in August, and this year there’s only one time it can happen a little bit more frequently than that but not that frequently. It’s just a handful of times in a year.
IA: And I’m more likely to go with that, especially with the description of what the void-of-course represents. I don’t feel that it’s something that happens so frequently like that. So I spoke about the client of mine who has that– I’ve never seen another chart like that.
CB: Right.
IA: It’s really like a ‘once-in-a-blue-moon’, you could say, kind of event, so it’s not going to be something that’s common.
CB: Yeah. And there’s another definition, a third definition of void-of-course which I tend to actually pay attention to more in practice, and this is the definition that the Moon is not applying to any planets with an orb, depending on what orb that you’re using.
IA: Okay, yeah.
CB: So in the Hellenistic tradition, they tended to use an orb of twelve degrees for the Moon…
IA: For the Moon.
CB: …for applying aspects, which is about the average daily motion of the Moon. The average distance that the Moon will travel in a 24-hour period is about 12 degrees. And just as a matter of practice, there’s a separate historical discussion about that that I talked about last month with Yasmin, and that Sue Ward and I are going to talk about a little bit later this month, when we talk about the ‘considerations before judgment’.
And she made a discovery. She thinks that Lilly’s definition of void-of-course was actually this definition, that the Moon is not applying with an orb to any planets, and that it was not the other definition that’s the more modern version that is usually assumed to come from Lilly.
IA: Right, okay.
CB: So here’s a diagram for that really quickly. So let’s say the Moon is at 10 degrees of Aries and that it’s just completed an exact aspect, a sextile with Venus at 10 degrees of Aquarius, and the next aspect that it will make is a conjunction to Jupiter at 29 degrees of Aries. But that’s a full 19 degrees away, so that’s not usually considered to be within the immediate application or the immediate orb of the Moon, which let’s say is 10-12 degrees or something like that. So that means for the next 10-12 degrees, it’s going to be, according to this definition, void- of-course, just because it’s not making a close application in the next 24 hours.
IA: Okay.
CB: So that’s the definition. And I think in practice that’s the definition I tend to pay attention to the most in terms of electional charts. In electional charts, you’re always looking for what is the next applying aspect that the Moon is going to make because that’s going to indicate what’s going to come up in the future after your electional is initiated.
IA: Most definitely.
CB: And that’s one of the most core fundamental rules in traditional electional astrology–you should always make sure that the Moon is applying to positive aspects and is not applying to difficult aspects.
IA: Yeah. But traditionally, or Hellenistically, they would have even maybe considered that a conjunction even in the same sign.
CB: Yeah, that’s a true sign. They would consider that being in the same sign as like a sign-based conjunction. That’s a good point.
IA: Yeah.
CB: And it gets tricky since we’re talking about 2,000 years of different history. And I think it’s tricky because what void-of-course meant may have changed in different eras, and it also may have been different with different authors. It may be true that in practice Lilly may have used this ‘not applying with an orb within 12 degrees’ rule, but in other earlier authors, like Abu Ma’shar, it almost looks to me like he was paying attention to the sign boundary, and he did think that maybe it had to be applying within the same sign and that there may have been a distinction if there was a sign boundary that was in the way of the application.
IA: Way of the application, yeah.
CB: Yeah, so I’ll get into that more with Sue Ward. But I just wanted to point that out as something that, just in a practical sense, if you’re paying attention to what the next applying aspects are of the Moon in the next 12 degrees, you will tend to notice. If you’re doing electional astrology on a regular basis, if you’ve come across a day where the Moon is not applying within 12 degrees to anything, it kind of stands out, and there might be some sense of things not coming to a sort of immediate completion on those days.
IA: Yeah. And with that chart that you just used as an example, what I would say there is that if that was used in some kind of an electional situation, I would say, yeah, the Moon is going towards Jupiter; but because it’s far away, it’s probably going to take quite a while for it to really be anchored or manifest. It’s not something that is going to manifest anytime soon, so it could be seen as maybe a bit of a delay or something like that. Personally, I would wait until the Moon was much closer to Jupiter and then use that election.
CB: That makes sense. Okay, so that’s void-of-course Moon, we wanted to touch on that. Let me take a look at our outline before we jump into some modern astrological authors and what they said about things. So we touched upon fastest-moving celestial body. It’s the closest body to Earth. It’s a 28-day, roughly, orbital cycle.
IA: Yeah.
CB: We just touched upon the average daily motion of the Moon, which is that it moves about 12 degrees, give or take, in a 24-hour period. We sort of touched base a little bit about ‘lunations’ and about the concept of lunations. I don’t know if there’s anything more that we need to say about that. Here’s some illustrations, just some stock art that I got.
Here’s a lunar calendar for 2021 just showing how over the course of the month, each month, the Moon goes through its different phases over the course of a year. There’s also 12 lunations per year. So the Sun and the Moon will meet up 12 times to form a New Moon over a one-year period and that probably is part of the reason why there’s 12 signs of the zodiac because there are 12 lunations each year.
IA: Exactly.
CB: So that’s important. Let’s see, there’s the ‘lunation cycle’ and the notion of ‘waxing’ versus ‘waning’ we might mention really quickly. So when the Moon conjoins the Sun, and then the Moon begins separating from the Sun, the conjunction itself is when the Moon is at a New Moon phase, and that’s when the Moon is at its darkest. Then when it begins separating from the Sun, the Moon begins increasing in light and it starts getting brighter and brighter and brighter, and that is said to be the waxing phase of the Moon, all the way from the conjunction up to the opposition between the Sun and the Moon; and that takes about two weeks to complete that half of the cycle.
IA: Yeah.
CB: Then the Full Moon takes place when the Moon is opposite to the Sun. And the Moon at that point is at peak brightness so that the full disc of the Moon is illuminated and is radiating light at that point, when the Moon is opposite to the Sun. Then from the exact Full Moon forward, the next 180 degrees up until the next conjunction with the Sun, is the waning phase when the Moon starts decreasing in light, and the Moon goes from its brightest and starts getting darker and darker and darker, until eventually it conjoins the Sun again at the next New Moon.
IA: Yeah. And even from tradition, there’s been an association with the cycles, the lunar cycles, also in connection with, perhaps, personality, when certain things are going to manifest in our life. So depending on if we are born during a first quarter Moon, or a Full Moon phase, or a waning Moon, or a last quarter phase that has also been associated symbolically with perhaps certain things happening in our life as well.
Dane Rudhyar, he wrote a book, The Lunation Cycle, which was a really good book. He goes into certain kinds of personalities, how when we are born at particular cycles of the Moon– whether it was waxing or Full Moon–it tended to be seen in certain personality types, certain occupations that certain people had. So for example, people who were born on the Full Moon were seen as people who were leaders, or people who were quite famous or had very prominent roles perhaps in society; whereas maybe people who were born in a New Moon phase or that early stage tended to be more eager and very innocent going out into the world, wanting to learn new things. While people who were born at the first quarter tended to have a kind of life where they were always fighting against something or struggling against something, but they made profound breakthroughs. So the different cycles of the Moon also tend to correspond with certain personality traits, and in many cases, even certain occupations that we may also take on board in our lives as well.
So the lunation cycle is quite fascinating to look at. It’s something that I’m always looking at with clients, with people’s charts. Are they born at New Moon phase? At first quarter? Is it waxing gibbous? Is it Full Moon? Is it waning gibbous? Is it last quarter? Balsamic Moon? What is the phase that we are born in? Because there’s something about the quality of the phase of where the Moon was at that corresponds to us also as well.
And let’s not forget that that same distance, the lunar phase, is essentially the template that we’re using to mark the Part of Fortune in the chart because it’s the distance between where the Sun and Moon are. We’re taking that distance and projecting it from the Ascendant. So there’s something about that, about that lunar phase in which we were born. It’s very, very important and very key to who we are.
CB: Yeah. And the lunation cycle and what lunar phase you were born under and the idea of that imprinting some part of your personality, I know Dane Rudhyar wrote a whole book on that. And then Demetra George has also done a lot of work on [that], and she has this great article on her website. You can just Google ‘the lunation cycle’, ‘Demetra George’. And she talks about, depending on what part of the lunation cycle you were born in, some of the personality traits associated with that. And it has a nice diagram from one of her books where she talks about each of those different parts of the lunation cycle and what the quality of those moments in time is.
IA: Yeah, definitely.
CB: So that’s a whole topic in and of itself. I’ll have to do an episode on it at some point, probably too much to go into today. One thing we didn’t mention, which we could mention really quickly since we’re getting into the lunation cycle, is there’s one New Moon and one Full Moon each month and they’re always approximately 14 days or two weeks apart. Whereas when there’s a Sun-Moon conjunction, when there’s a New Moon or a Full Moon, and it takes place near the North or South Node of the Moon, then that will also tend to be an eclipse, if it’s close enough to the Nodes.
IA: Yeah.
CB: So the easy way to tell is that if it’s a conjunction of the Sun and the Moon next to the nodes, then it’s going to be a solar eclipse because that’s when the Moon passes in front of the face of the Sun; whereas if there’s a Full Moon that takes place near a conjunction with one of the nodes, either the North or the South Node, then it’s going to be a lunar eclipse. So just basic, basic astronomy, but good to know as you’re learning about the Moon and its purpose in astrology.
Let me see if I have any other images related to that to show for our video viewers. Phases of the Moon. Picture of the Moon. There’s a solar eclipse. I think this was the ‘Great American Eclipse’ in 2017.
IA: Oh, okay.
CB: There’s an old painting, a famous painting of an eclipse taking place, and there’s a bunch of astrologers, and people are kind of freaked out about it. And eclipses traditionally were sometimes viewed as negative or as ominous phenomenon because it was kind of out of the ordinary. During a total solar eclipse what happens is that it’s bright, and it’s the middle of the day and everything’s going great, and then all of a sudden the Moon moves in front of the Sun and it becomes dark out as if it’s like the middle of the night right in the middle of the day.
And so, there was some sense of not just light being extinguished in the middle of the day and that being odd, but also of almost like an interruption in the natural order of things. Normally, if it’s like one o’clock in the afternoon, it’s supposed to be bright out; but if it suddenly becomes dark out then there’s a basic disconnect or there’s some sort of disruption in nature in some sense.
IA: Yeah, yeah, and hence, why eclipses are always seen as very powerful, sensitive, somewhat auspicious–depending on the kind of eclipse–times. And we know that the eclipses, again, New Moon/Full Moons, they’re telling us about beginnings and endings. They’re telling about something being planted, the seeding of something, and something coming to fruition, something manifesting. That Full Moon is when the Moon is in her full glory.; it’s the peak of something, something reaching its heights, and again, getting ready for that.
It’s kind of like that Wheel of Fortune image which you showed earlier on: so the new beginnings and the peaks; and the birth and the death; the recycling. So the Moon is telling us the story of life and death and of nature itself and how we’re interacting with that throughout the month, throughout the year.
CB: Yeah, I like that. That’s really important, life and death, and also, growth and decay, and the notion of generation and corruption as basic, fundamental, biological and material properties that are built into the universe and built into the physical incarnation that we find ourselves in; that being a part of the cycle and that really being closely symbolized by the Moon through its frequent, monthly increasing in light from New Moon all the way to Full Moon, and then decreasing in light from Full Moon to New Moon.
IA: Yeah, definitely.
CB: Okay, so why don’t we jump forward then. So we’ve covered two traditional sources. And there’s a bunch of other ones we could have gone through; I decided to skip over a bunch and just do Valens from the 2nd century and then William Lilly from the 17th century. So next, I wanted to jump forward to the 20th century, first with Reinhold Ebertin and his book, The Combination of Stellar Influences, which was published in 1940.
So this is the foundational text of a school of astrology known as Cosmobiology. It’s kind of taken over some things from early modern astrology and traditional astrology, but also from Uranian astrology or the Hamburg School of Astrology which was a school of astrology in Germany in the early 20th century. So this is originally written in German–he was a German astrologer–and translated into English by the American Federation of Astrologers.
IA: Yes.
CB: So he breaks it into different categories for each of the planets. And according to Ebertin, he says the Principle of the Moon is the “Soul” and “the female principle”. So that’s a little bit of a difference where he is associating the soul or the spirit with the Moon versus ancient astrology tended to associate it more with the Sun; so we’ll note some differences, but also some similarities.
So here he has a section titled Psychological Correspondence where he says, positive points: “Motherliness, domesticity, prudence, mobility, changeable-ness, adaptation, sense of form, memory.” Negative: “Repressed motherliness, love of comfort, impressionability, a care-free attitude or an easy-going nature, [and] moodiness.” Biological Correspondence, “Fertility, the bodily fluids, blood-serum, the lymph.” And then Sociological Correspondence, “The mother, the spouse, the wife, the family, the nation, hereditary qualities or traits as a whole.”
IA: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so that’s Ebertin. What do you think of that?
IA: Yeah, just going to the soul, I know sometimes spirit and soul are often used interchangeably by various schools of thought. From my understanding, the soul, that’s one of the reasons why they draw the Moon as the crescent Moon. As a matter of fact, I read somewhere that the symbol for the Moon actually used to be half of a circle, okay and then later they started using the crescent Moon as we see it today; it was half of the circle. And that was meant to symbolize at the beginning everything was all one, and then the separation of the Sun and Moon, so to speak; or in biblical terms it would be perhaps Adam and Eve.
There’s the story that Eve was taken from the rib of Adam, which is from the side, and that’s what the Moon is. So the Moon essentially is an extraction of the Sun, one could say, and that becomes the soul. So supposedly the spirit is meant to be…it’s solar, it’s high up; whereas the Moon, which is the soul, is the one that is drawing that energy down into the physical world. So the soul is something that’s very physiological, so to speak. It’s the humanistic part of, again, a sense of who we are.
And I also drew the correlation. You’re based in the US. We know America has a chart, and America is a Cancer Sun, which is ruled by the Moon. And one thing that’s always kind of fascinated me with America is that I always see it as a very Cancerian nation. But one of the things that’s also struck me is you have this thing–I know it’s predominantly amongst maybe Afro-Caribbean or black people in America–called ‘soul food’.
CB: Right.
IA: And again, I think it’s quite interesting that they attribute food to the soul. There’s something about nourishing the soul, or that ‘fed my soul’. So I can see how ‘soul’ would be attributed or connected with the Moon, whereas spirit is much more of a solar thing. I associate that more with Sun/solar; that’s more spirit. It’s fire. It’s something a bit more fiery. Even when we go into perhaps evangelical churches or something, they talk about the Holy Spirit and the fire, and you can see that it’s quite solar-orientated; whereas Moon is soul. It’s something a bit more personal; something inside and a bit more physiological as well.
CB: I like that. I can get on board with that. That makes sense to me. Here’s the birth chart of the US. Since you mentioned it, this is the Sibley chart, or the Sibley version of the chart with Sag rising, but it has Venus and Jupiter and the Sun and Mercury in Canada.
IA: You’ve got all your planets in Cancer.
CB: Yeah, it’s a stellium.
IA: Yeah, it’s a stellium. Your chart ruler’s in Cancer–everything. 10th house ruler’s in Cancer. Cancer’s the dominant factor here.
CB: Right. Yeah, definitely. And the Moon is in Aquarius; it looks like it’s just past the Full Moon. The Full Moon would have taken place in Capricorn a few days earlier. All right, so let’s see, back to Ebertin. Did we learn anything else? Has anything changed besides that in Ebertin? I mean, there’s some things that are the same or that are very similar. He did focus on ‘mobility’, which we’ve seen before. He also focused on ‘changeability’, but also ‘adaptation’. Being adaptable, or being able to adapt to people or circumstances I think is a nice extension of some of the receptive meanings we were talking about earlier.
IA: Yeah, definitely. And I suppose, as well, we have to be able to look at the moon because remember the Moon also presides over our instincts. It’s very instinctual. So there’s something about the way we live on Earth, the way we interact with nature where we have to learn how to adapt.
CB: Right.
IA: I know survival can be a ‘Martian’ thing, a ‘Mars’ thing, but there’s a strong lunar orientation as well, because we need food, we need to survive, we need to get clothes. So that there is that adaptation, and I feel that is strongly a lunar quality.
CB: Yeah, definitely. That makes a lot of sense. And also those being like biological, sometimes physiological characteristics of basic things that you need to survive physically, like to eat or to sleep or to have shelter; your home and your living situation and all of those things. And sometimes those inherent instinctual traits are bodily things that can be quite separate from, intellectually, your mind or what you think is moral or rational or something like that, which are more abstract structures; whereas sometimes physiological impulses can be things that just come from ancestry or come from different things that have been passed down inherently with you as part of the body or the physical lineage that you’re from in some way.
IA: Yeah, definitely.
CB: All right, that’s a good point. One last thing that’s connected with that that Ebertin mentions–that’s interesting that I don’t think we’ve seen before–is he mentions ‘memory’, which I thought was an interesting one.
IA: Yes, that’s very good.
CB: Memory is something that’s impressed on you. It’s like an impression that you receive and you hold after having an experience, but it’s something that you gather together and that sticks with you in the back of your mind.
IA: Yeah, that’s a very good point there, memory. Because very often when we speak about maybe memory or mind, it tends to be given to Mercury. However, the Moon actually is mind, but it’s a different kind of mind. Also, when you’re talking about memory, again, you’re talking about holding onto something–memories of when we were young or when we were children and things like that. That is all stored by the Moon. The Moon is the one that restores our memory; it’s not Mercury.
Mercury may be the one that can convey it–or maybe explain it, or speak it, or express it, or communicate it–but it’s actually the Moon that’s storing the memory; she’s keeping that. It’s in a storehouse, she’s containing it; because we have to remember that the Moon is the container. She’s the storehouse for all of our experiences. So she’s collecting or gathering all of those experiences and storing them in a particular place for when it can be reused or ready again; it can resurface.
So yeah, the Moon is memory. It’s quite interesting because in Vedic astrology, they attribute the Moon to the mind, which very often in Western astrology, we say, “Oh, that’s Mercury.” If our Moon is being disturbed in any way–whether by a transit or whether it’s like that in the natal chart–it will affect our mindset, our memory, how we function as a whole, so there’s a very strong link between Moon and mind. And that’s one of the reasons why, if we remember earlier on, there was something about the Moon being connected with being a drunkard, things like that. So being drunk was something that was affiliated, again, with the Moon. And when people are drunk, again, they lose their equilibrium. They don’t quite know where they are, their mind seems to be kind of all over the place, they can’t think straight. Again, these are all Moon qualities that we’re speaking about here.
CB: Yeah. And it’s funny because also it goes back to that old term that’s somewhat outdated, but the word ‘lunatic’ which is derived from the word for the Moon, which is luna in Latin. I just looked up a definition on Merriam-Webster, or maybe it’s on Google, that says, “[D]ated, a) affected with a severely disordered state of mind: insane; designed for the care of mentally ill people; in a ‘lunatic’ asylum.”
So I just thought it was interesting that you were talking about the notion of the Moon being connected with mind in Vedic astrology where that comes through very strongly. But even in the Western tradition, we have some of those associations of the Moon if it’s untethered and it’s not doing well, fluctuating too fast, and sometimes a person’s mind wandering too much or what have you.
IA: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Okay, so memories. And that can also be memories that you can recall from storage that are sitting there, and they can be recent memories of what I ate last night versus more long-term memories of like things that happened in the first years of your life that you may not even remember anymore that were foundational or influential or shaped your personality in very core ways, so that’s relevant. And then also, it might also link back to other notions of ancestral memories or family memories or other experiences that are part of your genetic makeup in a sense, but that you might not have any immediate awareness of or memory of.
IA: Yeah, exactly. Most definitely, the Moon is definitely connected with ancestry. It’s connected with history. It’s connected with the past. That’s why even with the nodes, with the whole North Node and South Node thing, very often the South Node has been associated with the Moon, hence, why they say the South Node is your past or your past life or what you came in with; whereas the Sun is very often attributed with the North Node of what you’re going for, what you’re trying to achieve and things of that nature. So the Moon, it’s to do with our past. It’s to do with our roots. It’s to do with where we were anchored. It’s to do with parents. It’s to do with nurturing, upbringing, our sense of security, all that which is in the past, whether in this lifetime or if you’re open to previous lifetimes as well.
I know, for example, in Jewish astrology, when I was studying that for a while, there’s the school of thought that your Moon sign was your previous incarnation Sun sign. So there’s that school of thought where they say that your Moon sign in this life was actually your Sun sign in your previous life. But again, it’s quite interesting that they’re still using that lunar template to do with the past; it’s something that’s there. The Moon in our chart may be even showing us something that was there even before we came into existence that’s connected with our ancestry, that’s connected with our past, that’s connected with our family, that’s connected with the home. It’s actually just showing something we’re born into and where we’re coming from.
CB: Right. So maybe ‘roots’ could be another good keyword for the Moon.
IA: Yeah, yeah. The past, the roots, yeah. DNA, ancestry. It’s all there.
CB: And then one other thing in terms of Ebertin, the discussion we just had was tying into that last signification he gives, which is: ‘hereditary qualities or traits as a whole’. It’s interesting, it’s a recurring theme, but he mentions the ‘mother’, but also ‘the spouse’ and ‘the wife’, in addition to ‘the family’ in general. And his first principle at the very top was ‘the female principle’.
So it might be worth mentioning that the Moon is one of the general significators sometimes for women both in astrology in general or in a horary chart, where somebody’s asking a question, but also in a natal chart in representing women or female figures in a person’s life in different ways. So it’s usually the Moon and Venus that are associated.
IA: And Venus. Yeah, that’s correct. So I can see why they use that with ‘the wife’ or ‘the spouse’. And again, a lot of that also would be associated with the lifestyle of those days because women were generally the housewives. They stayed at home, looked after the children, made sure that the house was kept. Looking after domestic situations, those were more affairs that belonged to the female. That doesn’t mean to say that a man can’t do it. In this day and time, we do have men who are actually doing that now, where roles are swapping. So again, men have Moons too.
CB: Right.
IA: And I think it’s also quite important to point out that, it’s not common, but there tends to be this idea that the Moon, because it’s feminine, it’s something to do with the females and women. But no, men have Moons too; we just may express it in different ways. Based on the kind of template that society may have or lifestyle or culture, they may express that Moon in different ways.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point–and that’s one of the things that I was trying to draw out by showing these quotes from different time periods–is that astrology is culturally relative to some extent, and the astrology is always a reflection of the culture that it’s being practiced in and some of the different ways that people’s lives will be adapted or ways that people adapt their lives depending on what the cultural norms are.
And that’s something important to keep in mind, and it’s a discussion that astrologers have when it comes to things in astrology like gender, gender distinctions, and to what extent some of these distinctions are still appropriate versus to what extent do we need to rethink or renegotiate some of these distinctions based on where society is at or where it’s going in the present, and that’s like an open, ongoing discussion.
IA: Yeah, yeah definitely.
CB: All right, so that was a really good point. I’m just looking at Valens’ significations again where he does say ‘housekeeping’, ‘the queen’, ‘the mistress of the house’ and other things like that. All right, so back to Ebertin. That might be it for Ebertin. So why don’t we jump to the next author that I wanted to check out, so we can cover all of them. We’ll jump forward 40 years to Rob Hand.
IA: Robert Hand.
CB: The great Rob Hand and his book, Horoscope Symbols, from 1981. So this was after the rise of modern psychological astrology, and even though there were psychological traits mentioned in Ebertin, and Rob Hand was influenced by Ebertin as a significant influence, there’s also been an influx of Jungian astrology in the works of Liz Greene and Paul Young and Dane Rudhyar and other astrologers who have pushed astrology in an even more psychological direction by this time, in the 1980s; and so we’ll see that as a difference in Rob’s stuff. And this is also before Rob got into traditional astrology as well. He was sort of at his most modern in some sense.
So here’s what Rob Hand has to say about the Moon. He says, “It is the idea of where we have come from: the source, the womb, the Great Mother. It is our past, childhood, heredity, or family (both current and ancestral).” So he’s nailing some of the stuff we’ve just been talking about really well.
IA: I couldn’t agree with him more.
CB: Yeah. “It is also bound up with our ideas of country and native land…the action of the Moon tends to be unconscious. Either it is part of the structure of the self that has not been examined (though it influences our thinking and perception every minute of the day), or it relates to experiences that were very early, even prenatal, and which are therefore not conscious. The Moon relates to unconscious assumptions that we have made about life from the beginning — attitudes that we learned from our parents without realizing it, hereditary mental patterns such as instincts, and very important, psychological patterns that arise from infantile experiences, both positive and negative.”
IA: Yeah.
CB: And then I think I skip over something and he says, “In most astrological literature, the Moon is considered the primary indicator of the emotions.” I think that’s like the first time, I don’t know if that was mentioned by Ebertin, but the notion of associating the Moon with emotions becomes a major focal point in modern astrology, in the late 20th and early 20th century Western astrology.
IA: Yeah, we don’t really see that word flying around so much in the traditional or medieval times.
CB: Right. And maybe that’s due to the rise of depth psychology or psychological analysis in the 20th century and the notion of emotions being more of a focal point or something.
IA: Yeah, definitely, definitely. And it may be shedding a bit of light on perhaps humanity as a whole. It may have been scratching the surface a bit more or tapping into more of what’s going on maybe on the inside, in that lunar realm, in that subconscious realm perhaps.
CB: Right. Yeah, that could make sense, like depth psychology being an analysis of both one’s emotion and one’s internal state. Also, early authors, like Freud, for example, were interested in a person’s dreams and what a person’s dream state had to say about a person’s psychology or things going on underneath the surface.
IA: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And he was a Taurus, where the Moon is exalted. And if my mind serves me correctly, I believe Jung had Moon in Taurus as well or something of that nature. I know he was a Leo, but I believe he had Moon in Taurus or something in Taurus. You may have his chart there. Bring it up.
CB: Not to fact-check you, but I was looking really quickly and I think you’re right. So here’s Freud’s chart. I like being able to do that when I’m having a discussion with astrologers, just bring the chart up.
IA: Bring up the chart, yeah, just in case there’s any mistake. Yeah, so Taurus.
CB: So yeah, Sun in Taurus. And then let me see if this will show up. So here’s Jung’s chart. Can you see that?
IA: Yeah, I can see Jung. Yeah, Moon in Taurus.
CB: Moon at 15 Taurus. That’s actually interesting and probably bears study in and of itself that Freud had his Sun at 16 degrees of Taurus and Jung had his Moon at 15 degrees of Taurus.
IA: Exactly, yeah.
CB: So they had like that classic Sun-Moon synastry. And maybe that’s worth mentioning really quickly in passing, that that’s supposed to be one of the traditional things indicating an important connection between two people in relationship astrology. If you share the same Sun or Moon sign as somebody else, there can be something about the way that you reflect parts of the personality back to the other person that is complementary in some way.
IA: Yeah, most definitely. And we know that obviously they had a very strong bond and relationship. Jung studied under Freud and that was his teacher; he looked up to him as a teacher, as a father figure. Yeah, they both made groundbreaking observations in and around people’s dreams and how that reflected aspects of their life, looking into the symbology of the dreams and what it meant. Again, the dreams, they’re the voice of the ‘oracle’, and people like Freud and Jung were able to understand the symbolic languages and what the dream was trying to convey or say to the client who had that particular dream.
CB: Yeah, and the Moon may be connected perhaps with sleep or dreams.
IA: Yeah.
CB: Also, one of the keywords that’s coming up here that’s brand new in Rob Hand’s significations is he talks about the unconscious – the unconscious things within the native that he relates to the native which is unconscious, but you do without realizing it, as opposed to like conscious actions or conscious states.
IA: Yeah, which is much more solar. That’s why the Moon represents our habits. Again, it’s instinctual. It’s stuff that we don’t even realize we’re doing. It’s stuff sometimes we catch ourselves. Sometimes we may go, “Oh, my god, I do do that. I don’t realize that I actually do that.” It’s that Moon just operating on that sub-level.
CB: Yeah. And maybe that’s why Sun-Moon contacts in synastry are good because maybe there’s something that the person does about their conscious personality that connects well with some part of the unconscious personality of the other person or something like that.
IA: Yeah, yeah. One helps or triggers the other; it’s a good balance.
CB: All right, we could stay there for a little bit, but let’s move on to the next one. I wanted to do two more excerpts: one of them is from Richard Tarnas and his 2006 book, Cosmos and Psyche. This is one of the last great works on modern astrology before the traditional revival really had taken off fully, and so, to me, it represents sort of a pure distillation of modern astrology. He also had some historical background and outlook, so it’s not that it completely excludes anything traditional, but to me this is a good encapsulation of some portions of what he calls ‘archetypal’ astrology.
IA: Yeah, definitely.
CB: So Tarnas says the Moon signifies “the matrix of being, the psychosomatic foundation of the self, the womb and the ground of life; the body and the soul, that which senses and intuits, the feeling nature; the impulse and capacity to gestate and bring forth, to receive and reflect, to relate and respond, to need and to care, to nurture and to be nurtured, the condition of dependence and interdependence; the diffusely conscious and the unconscious, the anima, the imminent, the centripetal, the home, the fertile source and ground; the cycle of manifestation, the waxing and waning, the eternal round; the ruler of the night sky, of the diffusely visible and the invisible, multiple sources of luminosity within the encompassing darkness, the polycentric; yin; the whole that contains the part in potentia; Luna and all lunar deities, the Great Mother Goddess, together with aspects of the Child (puella, puer) constituting the relational matrix of life.”
IA: It’s interesting because we were speaking about the movie, The Matrix. Another thing that jumps out to me with the movie, in the first, there was the bit where Morpheus obviously gives Neo–offers him the blue or the red pill. But when he takes the pill, one of the first things you see is him being in a pod, and you see all these great pods that look like eggs; and so that’s the ‘Matrix’. The womb is the matrix, this Earth is a matrix. It’s a system that’s holding us. It’s containing us. It’s anchoring us in some way, shape, or form. This is what the Moon represents. The Moon is the ‘Matrix’.
CB: Right, and the physical life that you’re born in. Because when he wakes up at that point, he realizes that he’s been living in a dream state.
IA: A dream, exactly.
CB: His mind has been in the simulation, but his actual physical body is being kept alive through tubes and stuff, and that was a much different experience of what his body was doing compared to where his mind was elsewhere.
IA: Exactly.
CB: So one of the things that’s mentioned here that we didn’t touch base on, even though it was mentioned way back in Valens, is that Tarnas mentions “that which senses and intuits”. And that’s actually a really good point because one of the significations that Valens gives that we glossed over was that it signifies the ‘left eye’.
IA: Yes.
CB: So both of the luminaries, the Moon and the Sun, were traditionally associated with the eyes, and to some extent, with sense perception. And that sometimes is actually a very literal manifestation where aspects to the luminaries can sometimes indicate things that have to do with the person’s eyesight and vision and ability to see and perceive things.
IA: Yeah, definitely, because the right eye was associated with the Sun. I think we get even certain aspects of that in the Egyptian myth where you’ve got the Eye of Horus, for example, which is, again, very often the right eye. And so, one is, again, ‘solar’ eye to be able to see in the day, to be able to see that which we’re conscious of, and the other is, again, the ability to be able to see in the darkness, in the night; so that is the ‘lunar’.
And it’s quite interesting also as well because when we look at the Moon, just going back to the houses, we know she has her ‘house of joy’ in the 3rd. But when the Sun is there, it’s around about there where it’s known as the most darkest point in the night.
CB: Right.
IA: When he’s transitioning from the 4th house to the 3rd house is technically kind of midnight-ish or one o’clock in the morning, depending on the season, of course. But that’s when he’s making his transition from that 4th into the 3rd, which is the most densest part of the night, the darkest part, and that’s where the Moon has her joy.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Let’s see–and it makes me think of also that notion of the luminaries being associated with seeing. And in the ancient world, there were two optical theories: one of them was that there’s rays emitted from the eyes which then fall on different things that are within their field of vision and that’s how we see; through a ray being emitted from the eye and then hitting something. There’s another theory that rays are instead received by the eyes, and that it’s through receiving these visual rays that we’re able to see and perceive things. And there was also a mixed view–and I think this was the view of some of the ancient astrologers–that the eyes can both emit as well as receive…
IA: And see as well.
CB: …rays of vision. And I think this is actually tied into the aspect doctrine and tied into the traditional rulership scheme, where the Sun is said to emit.
IA: Emit, yeah.
CB: And so, it emits rays on the right side, let’s say, going from Leo in its domicile to a sextile ray to Venus, and a square to Mars and a trine to Jupiter, in an opposition to Saturn; whereas the Moon was said to receive. And I think the rays were conceptualized then as going from the other planets, like Saturn in Capricorn and the Moon receiving it in Cancer, or Jupiter in Pisces and the Moon receiving it in Cancer, or Mars in Aries sending a square to the Moon in Cancer, or Venus in Taurus sending a sextile. So it’s like that ancient optical theory of rays being emitted or being received is tied in with that domicile scheme.
IA: Yeah, makes perfect sense.
CB: Yeah, but it’s funny how sometimes that can show up very literally. If you have major aspects or transits to the Sun or to the Moon, sometimes it can show up in things happening, like events that relate to your eyes.
IA: Yes.
CB: Sometimes that can be good things, but other times it can be challenging things; like I’ve had a challenging transit and had an eye infection or something like that.
IA: Yeah, I’ve seen that as well where people have certain difficult transits to the Moon, and there’s been problems literally as that to their left eye.
CB: All right, so is there anything else? There’s one more quote I wanted to read. But is there anything else about Tarnas that stands out that’s worth mentioning or are we ready to move on?
IA: Yeah, if we can just go back, he used a lot of very wonderful keywords there.
CB: Yeah, there’s stuff like the “anima,” for example, which is a whole thing. The “psychosomatic foundation of the self.”
IA: “The condition of dependence and interdependence,” which is quite interesting because we are all dependent on something. The Sun is more individualistic, it’s more independent, whereas the Moon shows us the part of us that we are dependent upon, or what is it that we look to depend upon. We rely upon it as a source, maybe food, a sense of security, both physical and emotional. So we are all dependent on something in life. We all need to feed on something in order to be able to exist, in order to live. We need a kind of food. We need a kind of liquid, kind of water. Humans try to structure society or try to make society in a particular way that can sustain us as human beings, or that can keep us in a particular kind of system, in an orderly kind of way.
So that’s very important as well to also understand that we depend on something. There’s a part of us that is independent, of course, but we’re not totally independent. Nothing is totally independent. Everything depends on something in order to coexist and that’s what the Moon brings us, as a unit, hence, why it’s connected with the ‘family’. It’s connected with the ‘home’, the ‘nation’, as Robert Hand said earlier on. It’s connected with ‘nation’. It’s connected with ‘country’. It’s all of that because of that sense of we are a part of something bigger, we’re a part of something larger. We’re part of a family, we’re a part of a grouping. That’s what the Moon’s purpose is about.
CB: That makes sense. It makes me think of the Moon and its placement the chart being where are you receptive and adaptable, but also where in your life do you make room for other people to sort of adapt to them as opposed to the opposite, which is asking other people to adapt to you, which is more of a ‘solar’ thing. The Sun just sort of shines and is what it is, and puts its light and its rays out there; whereas the Moon can tend to make room for other people or find ways to be more adaptable, and adaptive, and that can manifest either literally or in psychological traits.
IA: Yeah, most definitely.
CB: All right, so I want to squeeze this last one in here, since we’re almost up to like three hours on this podcast.
IA: No problem, man. We could be here for the next three months.
CB: Right. We’re one planet down. There’s only like nine planets to go, so there’s still work to do.
IA: Still work to do.
CB: Yeah. So let’s take a look at the last quote that I wanted to read, it’s from Demetra George and her 2009 book, Astrology and the Authentic Self. And I wanted to use this one as the last one because Demetra started out as a modern astrologer and was very similar to Rob Hand or to Richard Tarnas, but then she got into ancient astrology and studied Hellenistic and medieval and Renaissance astrology. And this book that she wrote in 2009, Astrology and the Authentic Self, was one of the first real attempts, I felt like at least for her, to synthesize those two traditions, the ancient and the modern traditions, and to try to bring them together. So I think the entire book and some of her delineations represent a bridge between those two worlds.
IA: Yeah.
CB: So here’s what she says for the Moon. She says, “The Moon is a general symbol of the body, in counterpoint to the Sun, which is a general symbol of the mind. In and of itself, the Moon signifies the ways in which the impressions of our early childhood conditioning have imprinted the patterning of our bodies, our instincts, and our emotional responses to life — all precognitive faculties. When we respond to situations based on our instincts and feelings, when we ‘act without thinking,’ these behaviors often can be traced back to what we experienced in early life when we were under our mother’s influence. As such, the Moon colors what makes us feel nurtured and secure, how we express nurturing towards others, and how we cope with emotional stress in our lives. Like the ocean tides that are regulated by the lunar phases, the tides in our bodies, as the ebb and flow of our moods, are under the domain of the Moon. While the Moon continues to symbolize all these other qualities, when evaluating its role in terms of the life purpose, we must see it as pointing to how an individual brings the conceptual vision of the life intention, as depicted by the Sun, into the physical world by grounding it in the daily actions of everyday life.”
IA: Yeah, yeah, I love that.
CB: Yeah, it really ties together a lot of those pieces from the ancient and modern traditions into a sort of cohesive whole.
IA: Yeah.
CB: So I’m trying to think if there’s anything we should take from that. I mean, I like the notion of “the daily actions of everyday life,” and again, that notion of the Moon being the fastest planet that we might associate with, you know, the days, as opposed to the Sun and associating that with the month or more long-term or slow things; our day-to-day life in some sense.
IA: Yeah, and hence, why people who are into astro-weather, for example–who can look at the daily charts and be able to see how it is going to be weather-wise–pay very close attention to the Moon, because the Moon, again, travels at least 12 degrees in a 24-hour day. So depending on what aspects she’s going to be making, the kind of aspects to the different planets will give us a very good indication of how the weather for that day perhaps is going to be influenced.
If she’s aspecting Mercury, we may expect a bit of wind or something like that, or if she’s expecting Venus, it may be very harmonious. If she’s aspecting the Sun, it may be a bit more warm, or Jupiter. If she’s expecting Saturn, it may be a bit more cold or a bit more harsh. Because the Moon is able to do that–she’s traveling so fast within a particular day–she will be making different aspects to different planets at any given time.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really great point–and you can see that. That’s what I use the animate feature for in Solar Fire, and I’ll have a clock on a separate screen, just throughout the course of a day, seeing what the Moon’s doing or what the different rising signs were; or I’ll have it on my phone on Solar Fire–on Astro Gold, where you can just pull up what the current chart is of the moment. And when the Moon is applying to an exact opposition with, let’s say, Mars in a day chart, that’s a much different energy than the Moon applying to a conjunction with Venus in a night chart or something like that.
IA: Of course. Most definitely.
CB: And you can kind of sense that in some, not intrinsic way, but on some core level, you can sort of see that and feel how that is on a day-to-day basis and how different days are experienced differently depending on what the Moon is doing and how rapidly that can change during the course of either a 24-hour period or over the course of like a week or a month.
IA: Yeah, yeah, mostly certainly.
CB: Yeah. All right, so that was all I had in terms of quotes from different astrologers that I wanted to go through. We’ve actually touched base on just about everything that we wanted to go through in the outline. There’s a few points that we could have gotten into, like there’s the secondary progressed Moon.
IA: Yes.
CB: That’s a whole thing we don’t necessarily have to get into. I think I might do an episode with Kelly on that at some point, Kelly Surtees, once she finishes her book on secondary progressions sometime later this year.
IA: You’ve got an episode on secondary progressions. I remember watching it a few years back, I believe.
CB: And I did that with Kelly Surtees, and we may have touched on the secondary progressed Moon in that. So people can just Google ‘secondary progressions’.
IA: Which I find to be one of the best predictives with progressions. The progressed Moon, for me, is perhaps one of the best predictive techniques or tools that one can actually use. The progressed Moon works like a charm to the degree. You can see events manifesting and happening.
CB: Yeah, definitely. With secondary progressions, you just look at the ephemeris basically, and you just treat every day after the person was born as a year of life.
IA: Life, yeah.
CB: And so, you count how many years-old you are right now. For example, I’m 36-years-old. So I would count 36 days after I was born and look at the chart for that day, and that chart will somehow reflect some of the experiences I’m having right now in this 36th year of life; and especially the position of the Moon and the aspects that it was making on that day are super-descriptive about what you’ll experience in that year.
IA: Yeah, and that’s another key point there from that perspective to understand that, when we were born, within a month after our birth, the Moon had transited every single planet in our chart and touched all of our planets in our chart by every aspect possible. And if we’re using that template as the progression, we could say that the Moon has kind of set the tone, within that first month after we were born, has set the tone, has made the structure based on each planet that she’s touched and how that’s going to play out in our lives further down the line.
So 10 days after we were born will equate to perhaps 10 years after we were born. 20 days after we were born would be 20 years after we’re born; 30 and so on and so forth. The Moon has already set that up for us; she’s already touched those planets. So she’s anchored them, and she’s anchored them there so when we come to that point at a certain age, whether it’s age 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, we will experience that. So it’s the Moon that’s setting everything up. She’s setting that foundation.
CB: That makes a lot of sense, and that’s a good point. And, also, that means when you’re 28 years old that also then is the first time that the Moon will have completed approximately a full cycle around the zodiac…
IA: Exactly.
CB: …in your secondary progressed chart. And that also kind of coincides with the Saturn return, which occurs between the ages of 27 and 20–or 27 and 30. So the Saturn return is treated as a big deal in and of itself, and as you know, the ending of one cycle and beginning of a new cycle in your life that lasts for about 28 years or 30 years. But knowing that the secondary progressed lunation cycle also completes around that time, around every 28 years or so, and knowing that that’s ending one cycle and beginning a new one is also important in that context.
IA: Yeah, most definitely. Yeah, for sure.
CB: Okay, let’s see. So I wrote down really quickly this morning that one interesting part about the Indian tradition is the Chandra lagna because of how much emphasis is placed on the Moon in the Indian tradition. That’s partially because in Indian astrology, the original, indigenous astrology was based on the nakshatras, which is like a 27- or 28-sign lunar zodiac that’s about, what, 12 or 13 degrees each.
IA: Yeah.
CB: But one of the things that Indian astrologers do that’s somewhat unique is they’ll not just pay attention to whole sign houses derived from the Ascendant or the lagna, but they’ll also do a separate chart with houses derived from the Moon sign and then do basically whole sign houses from the Moon.
IA: Moon, yeah. And that is a technique actually which was somewhat practiced also in the West. And where I saw that was when I was learning with Robert Hand the ‘Seven Ages of Man’.
CB: Okay.
IA: And what you do with the ‘Seven Ages of Man’–basically the order in the chart which you showed earlier on from Saturn, from the slowest planet, to the Moon, who is the fastest planet; and what happens is working back out, so then you start again. So basically what happens is each planet gets a certain amount of time or a certain amount of years: so the Moon gets 4 years; Mercury gets 10 years; Venus gets 8, and so on and so forth.
So what happens is if you take the chart and look at the first 4 years of your life, what you do is you put the Moon on the Ascendant. So wherever the Moon is in your natal chart, put the Moon on the Ascendant and look at that as a chart within itself as the first 4 years of your life, and look at the transits that were going on during that time. And then when it comes to Mercury for the 10 years, put Mercury on the Ascendant; and then put Venus on the Ascendant.
So they were using those techniques definitely in Vedic astrology. It’s something that they really emphasized, looking at the Chandra lagna. It’s very, very important; it’s a very important lagna. And again, looking from the Moon because the Moon is the most physical, most basic, fundamental part of the chart.
CB: Yeah, definitely. And in Hellenistic astrology, the other analogue is Valens will do houses from the Ascendant, but the other point that he’ll drive houses from is the Lot of Fortune or the Part of Fortune, where whatever sign the Lot of Fortune is in, that becomes the 1st whole sign house, and then the sign after that becomes the 2nd house, and so on and so forth. And of course, the Lot of Fortune, as you said earlier, is the lot associated with the Moon.
IA: Moon, yeah.
CB: And so, I always thought it was interesting that they’ve got that in the Hellenistic tradition, and then in the Indian tradition, it seemed like the concept of lots didn’t really carry over. But they almost kind of said instead of using that mathematical point, we’ll just use the Moon itself, and use that as the alternative Ascendant that they’ll draw houses from. So there’s an interesting parallel of having a desire to use some sort of lunar Ascendant in both the ancient Hellenistic and ancient Indian traditions.
IA: Yeah, definitely.
CB: All right, so that is something. Let me take a look at our outline. We’ve covered so much ground, I’m kind of astonished. I didn’t think we’d pull it off. You’ve been telling me for months we’re going to have plenty to talk about, this is going to be a great episode.
IA: It keeps going on and on. I mean, I’ll be honest with you, sometimes I see clients, especially when I see that they’ve got the nocturnal charts, and I’m speaking about the Moon, it’s meant to be an hour consultation, the first 30 minutes, 45 minutes are gone, I’m still on the Moon.
CB: Yeah. And that actually reminds me of something I was about to say but would have forgotten. So I do derived houses from the Lot of Fortune. We talked about sect and the notion that if you’re born during the day, the Sun might be more important for you, and if you’re born at night, the Moon might be more important.
IA: Yes.
CB: And when I do horoscopes, when I do monthly horoscopes or yearly ones, usually I say look at these from the perspective of your rising sign. But I do think you can also look at it from the perspective of especially your Sun sign if you’re born during the day, or your Moon sign if you’re born at night, and that can be a perfectly valid way to approach things and a useful way to approach things. And especially, let’s say you don’t know what time you’re born…
IA: Yeah, I was just about to say that. I was about to say that it’s something that I’ve used for many of my clients who have no idea when they were born. Yeah, put the Moon on the Ascendant, put the Sun on the Ascendant. Putting the Sun on the Ascendant is a common one, but yeah, using the Moon.
CB: And I think if you didn’t know what time you were born, but you did know you were born at night, then I would definitely emphasize the Moon, whole sign houses from the Moon, and you’ll be in decent shape.
IA: Yeah, most definitely.
CB: All right, is there anything that we meant to mention or should have mentioned that we did not mention in the context of this episode? We didn’t really go too much into sign placement or house placement. We did talk about aspects.
IA: Yeah. We may have to do a part two.
CB: Yeah, that might require a follow-up since we’re at about three hours.
IA: We need to do a follow-up, definitely.
CB: Okay.
IA: Yeah, for sure, we need to do a follow-up because the Moon is just so in-depth. Again, looking at house placements, looking at sign placements, looking at aspects as well, where the aspects are coming from. Just kind of going into the overall condition of the Moon, of how the Moon is situated in the chart; how it can manifest; how it will and how it can manifest as certain experiences in one’s life depending on, again, applications or separations from particular planets; how one’s life story is inbuilt in the placement of the Moon.
And for me, I know I’m going to be slightly biased because I am Cancer rising, and I’ve got that Moon in Taurus. And again, even for people born in the day, you still have a Moon and for me, it’s really fundamental. It’s something that I pay a lot of attention to when I’m dealing with clients, with my students also as well. Pay attention to that Moon, that Moon is really key. You can’t do nothing without it.
CB: Yeah. I want to show your chart really quickly, again, just to flash it since you showed at the beginning. But that Cancer rising, with the ruler of the Ascendant being the Moon in a night chart, exalted in Taurus in the 11th house and that’s such a perfect placement for you being in the 11th house of like friends and groups and associations. Because one, as long as I’ve known you, you’ve always come off as such an open and welcoming person, and you’re always smiling, but also you have a great way of bringing people together.
You’ve been vice president of the Astrological Lodge of London for years, but now, in your new role as president, you’re literally involved in an 11th house…
IA: Oh, most definitely.
CB: …role of bringing together groups in an organization and helping to bring people together and gather them in a way that really makes sense in a very literal fashion.
IA: Yeah, definitely. It’s been the story of my life. I’ve always been part of this group, part of that group, and part of this tarot group. Just the other day on Facebook, I was just checking, and I was like, “I’m a part of like 300-and-something groups on Facebook.” So I was like, “I got to stop now,” and then I saw another group. “Oh, that looks interesting. I’ll join them.” So I have this tendency, groups is kind of my thing and that’s that Moon in the 11th house. It’s very strong.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. And sometimes that’s not always the case, or there could be challenges to that where sometimes people have more an aversion to groups or run into issues or things like that. But that’s not necessarily the case with you, but it’s just a good example of the Moon in that function and that natural tendency that it has to try to bring people and bring things together.
IA: Yeah.
CB: So with that in mind, that’s a great transition back to I just really want to strongly encourage and plug people to check out the Astrological Lodge of London. And like you said, you have been hosting weekly, online meetings for the past year basically, right?
IA: Yeah, since last year, October, we started. We do have breaks, a little bit like schools, so we’ll have an Easter break, we’ll have a summer break as well, and winter break. But pretty much every Monday, we have two lectures every Monday evening, which start about 7:00 PM, UK time. There’s two lectures every week. So we’ll have two different speakers, and they speak for about an hour. An hour or so, we open the floor for questions and answers for people who are attending.
We also have a free beginners astrology class as well, which is held every week. That starts from 5:30 until 6:30, and then the main lecture will start at 7:00 PM. And currently, there’s a new beginner’s class. It’s dealing with Vedic astrology actually which is quite interesting, which is taught by Sonal Sachdeva. So yeah, we’re pretty active, and you can find all the information on our website.
CB: Cool. And that is AstroLodge.co.uk?
IA: Yeah, that’s right.
CB: Cool. And then, for yourself, I know that you do consultations with astrology and tarot. And you also teach private classes and do private tutoring, right?
IA: Yeah, certainly. So my website is www.SacredPlanets.com. At the moment, I’m actually putting together the classes that I’m going to be teaching for after the Easter period. So I’m going to be putting some new classes together. I haven’t uploaded them yet on the website, but they will be going up there in the next couple of weeks.
I do private tuitions also as well, and I’m available for private consultations, seeing clients and having a look at your chart, yeah, looking at your Moon. So yeah, I’m pretty active.
CB: Awesome. Well, yeah, people should definitely check out your website and check out the lodge website.
IA: Yes.
CB: It’s such a great resource. Like last year, I ran into an astrologers that reached out to me and said that they always listen to the podcast, but they didn’t know any astrologers in real life.
IA: Oh, wow.
CB: And I said, “Where do you live?” They said, “I live in London.” And I said, “Have you met Israel?” And they were like, “Who?” And I told them about the lodge, and I said, “You should check it out,” and they were very excited to hear about you. So I hope there’s like more people that hear this and connect.
IA: Yeah, definitely. More and more people have been coming. We’ve been getting lots more new people, new faces, which is really good. A lot of them are signing up and becoming members as well because we offer a membership, so they get a discounted price when they attend each of the classes. Plus, they get our magazine, which comes out like four times a year, The Quarterly. it’s got some beautiful articles in there as well. So yeah, we’re very active.
Yes, we’re based in London. But at the moment, because of the whole situation of lockdown, the coronavirus, everything is online. So essentially, we’re worldwide now. I mean, we’ve always been worldwide, but I suppose the COVID situation has catapulted it. It’s made it faster and more readily accessible now.
CB: Right. Awesome. Well, thanks a lot for joining me for this today. This was awesome.
IA: Thanks for having me, Chris.
CB: I really enjoyed this.
IA: We’ve definitely gotta do a part two, part three, part four. There’s so much in-depth and so many layers, again, to the Moon. Yeah, I would just advise people, pay very close attention to your Moon, watch it. Look at the aspects. Look at the conditions. Again, we saw some of those words there, some of the quotes by some of the authors there. The ability to reflect, I think Richard Tarnas put there, to receive, to reflect. So we can utilize, watch our Moons. I often look at the Moon in my chart and just reflect back to when I was young, how my upbringing was, what was the family like, what was the home like, and it’s like, “Ah, I can see it resonating in regards to where the Moon is in my chart.”
So I would advise everybody to do that. Look at that Moon. What was your mother like? What was the upbringing like? What were the circumstances like? And you’ll see that from the aspects to your Moon, because the Moon is actually telling us a story, it’s the storyteller. And that’s quite interesting because in ancient times that’s when people gathered around the fire at night.
At night, when the Moon was out, is where they would gather around the fire and tell stories, and the villages or the towns would have a local storyteller, or it could be the shaman or whoever would come and tell the mythology and tell the stories while the Moon was out. So the Moon is our storyteller. She’s telling us the story of our life, of who we were, who we are, and who we are going to be.
CB: Brilliant, I like that. And I almost want to go on another whole digression, but that was so beautiful that I want to leave it right there.
IA: Right.
CB: So thanks a lot for joining me today.
IA: Thanks a lot, Chris.
CB: Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Let us know what you think in the comments below about your own Moon placement or things that you’ve observed, as well as whether you’d like us to continue this series and do other planets in the future. Give us some feedback and let us know, and we’ll see what we can do.
So thanks for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
IA: Thank you very much. Thank you.
CB: Special thanks to all the patrons that supported the production of this episode of The Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon.com. In particular, thanks to the patrons on our Producers tier, including: Nate Craddock, Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Michelle Merillat, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelique Nambo, Sumo Coppock, Nadia Habhab, Issa Sabah, Morgan MacKenzie, and Jake Otero. For more information about how to become a patron and get access to exclusive subscriber benefits, such as early access to new episodes, go to Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
Also, special thanks to our sponsors, including the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening online, May 27-31, 2021; find out more information at NORWAC.net; The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, which you can find out more information about at MountainAstrologer.com; the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs, which you can find out more information about at honeycomb.co; also, the Portland School of Astrology; more information at PortlandAstrology.org; the Astro Gold Astrology App, available for both iPhone and Android, available at Astrogold.io.
And finally, the primary software program that we use on episodes of The Astrology Podcast is called Solar Fire Astrology Software, which is available at Alabe.com. And you can get a 15% discount with the promo code, ‘AP15’.